PropertyChanged Event Propagation

This is my approach for enabling property changed event propagation across the ViewModels in an Mvvm approach. The goal is to be able to use attributes decoration to map dependencies between properties and/or methods within the ViewModel

This is a follow up of a request made in the MvvmCross repo: MvvmCross/MvvmCross#300

Version Info

• MvvmCross: 5.6.3
• Android SDK: 7.0 Nougat

Releases

• 2018/01/07 Code cleanup and update to Mvx 5.6.3
  • Updated all nuget packages
  • Updated projects to newer versions of portable and Droid SDK
  • Cleaned up the repository
• 2013/06/09 First version of the project.

Description

The main goal is to transform something like this:

public string FirstName
{
	get { return _fristName; }
	set
	{
		if (_fristName != value)
		{
			_fristName = value;
			RaisePropertyChanged(() => FirstName);
			RaisePropertyChanged(() => FullName);
		}
	}
}
private string _fristName;

public string LastName
{
	get { return _lastName; }
	set
	{
		if (_lastName != value)
		{
			_lastName = value;
			RaisePropertyChanged(() => LastName);
			RaisePropertyChanged(() => FullName);
		}
	}
}
private string _lastName;

public string FullName
{
	get { return FirstName + " " + LastName; }
}

Into something like

public string FirstName
{
	get { return _fristName; }
	set
	{
		if (_fristName != value)
		{
			_fristName = value;
			RaisePropertyChanged(() => FirstName);
		}
	}
}
private string _fristName;

public string LastName
{
	get { return _lastName; }
	set
	{
		if (_lastName != value)
		{
			_lastName = value;
			RaisePropertyChanged(() => LastName);
		}
	}
}
private string _lastName;

[DependsOn("FirstName")]
[DependsOn("LastName")]
public string FullName
{
	get { return FirstName + " " + LastName; }
}

The DependsOn attributes forces a RaisePropertyChanged to the decorated property, when the dependant properties are changes. In the example above, the property FullName will have a RaisePropertyChanged every time the FirstName or LastNameare changed. We can also apply the DependsOn to parameterless methods. Instead of Raising the property changed event, the methods are simply invoqued.

[DependsOn("FullName")]
public void IncrementFullNameChangedCounter()
{
	FullNameChangedCounter++;
}

This behaviour is intended for ObservableCollection also. For this first version, we only 'look' at changes of the collection itself (add, remove, reset).

public ObservableCollection<string> NamesList
{
	get { return _namesList; }
}
private readonly ObservableCollection<string> _namesList = new ObservableCollection<string>();

[DependsOn("NamesList")]
public int NamesListCounter
{
	get { return NamesList.Count; }
}

Future Releases

• The event hook should be done using WeakReferences. Slodge allready stated this in MvvmCross/MvvmCross#300

• Add the ability to 'listen' to changes of the items inside an ObservableCollection The property names of the raised events, should have the following name: <ObservableCollectionName>.<PropertyName>