A Simple ViewModelLocator for Spawning ViewModels for XAML Based Applications

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There are numerous frameworks out there that provide mechanisms for instantiating view models. Long again, when I first started building XAML based applications and became familiar with MVVM, I stepped through a number of different ways of creating and wiring up view models. In this post I’m going to show a very basic implementation of a locator to instantiate view models. Into the Core library I will add a ViewModelLocator class which exposes a property, Main, that will return a new instance of the MainViewModel.

public class ViewModelLocator
{
    public MainViewModel Main
    {
        get { return CreateViewModel<MainViewModel>(); }
    }

    private T CreateViewModel<T>() where T:new()
    {
        return new T();
    }
}

I’m going to want a single instance of this class to be created and kept around for the duration of my application’s lifecycle. One option would be to instantiate it within my ApplicationCore class I introduced previously. However, I actually want the instance of the ViewModelLocator to be accessible via XAML, so for this reason it makes more sense to instantiate it as a XAML resource. In the WPF and Universal (Win/WP8.1) applications I can simply add this to the app.xaml file to the Application.Resource element.

<Application.Resources>
        <core:ViewModelLocator x_Key=”Locator” />
</Application.Resources>

In the MainWindow (WPF) and MainPage (Universal) I can now specify the DataContext in the opening element, removing the need to create the MainViewModel in code in the codebehind file. Eg

<Window x_Class=”RealEstateInspector.Desktop.MainWindow”
        “>“
        “>“
        DataContext=”{Binding Main, Source={StaticResource Locator}}” >

The current implementation of Xamarin.Forms doesn’t seem to support creating Application resources in XAML. However, by tweaking the App constructor, I can add an instance of the ViewModelLocator:

public App()
{
    Resources = new ResourceDictionary();
    Resources.Add(“Locator”, new ViewModelLocator());

    MainPage =new MainPage();
}

The syntax in the MainPage of the XForms application is similar except BindingContext replaces DataContext:

BindingContext=”{Binding Main, Source={StaticResource Locator}}”

There seems to be a quirk in XForms at the moment in that the Binding expression calls to the Main property repeatedly – since it gets a different instance of the MainViewModel back each time, it ends up in an endless loop trying to get a consistent value. To prevent this, we can add a view model dictionary to the ViewModelLocator and change the behaviour to always return the same instance of the view model.

private readonly Dictionary<Type, object> viewModels = new Dictionary<Type, object>();

private T CreateViewModel<T>() where T:new()
{
    var type = typeof (T);
    object existing;
    if (!viewModels.TryGetValue(type, out existing))
    {
        existing = new T();
        viewModels[type] = existing;
    }
    return (T)existing;
}

And there you have it – view model location across all applications.

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