Navigate to a View without ViewModel in MvvmCross

Question

My general question: Is there a way to navigate to a View without ViewModel?

In example:

I have an Activity which doesn't include a ViewModel, cause it's displaying only a picture for a short time and disappears afterwards. Now the normal way would be to do a requestNavigate(). But i have no ViewModel to enter there. How can i navigate to this activity?

Thanks for answers!

Answer 1

My opinion: Yes - you should always use a ViewModel.

On each platform, the mvvmcross framework uses the Type of the ViewModel in order to identify which View to show.

If you don't use a ViewModel, then how will the client apps know what View to show?

---

If you find you have a lot of these empty ViewModel classes, then you could, of course, always use a ViewModel like:

  public class StaticViewModel : BaseViewModel
  {
      public enum WhichOne
      {
          AboutPage,
          InfoPage,
          HelpPage,
          // etc
      }

      public WhichOne WhichPage { get; set; }

      public StaticViewModel(string which)
      {
          WhichPage = (WhichOne) Enum.Parse(typeof(WhichOne), which, false);
      }
  }

but overall, I don't think this would gain you anything over using one ViewModel per View...