Using RIO and Sqlite-net in MvvmCross

Question

In the excellent mvvmcross-library I can use RIO binding to prevent unreadable code:

public INC<String>Title = new NC<String>();

Then I can read and write values using Title.Value. Makes the models much more readable.

Normally, this property would be written as: private string _title;

    public string Title
    {
        get { return _title; }
        set
        {
            _title = value;
            RaisePropertyChanged("Title");
        }
    }

But when I want to use sqlite-net, these fields cannot be streamed to the database because they are not basic types with a getter and setter.

I can think of a few options how to get around that:

1. Make a new simple object that is similar to the model, but only with the direct db-fields. And create a simple import-export static method on the model. This also could prevent struggling with complex model-code that never needs to relate to the actual database.
2. Make sqlite-net understand reading NC-fields. I read into the code of the mapper, but it looks like this is going to be a lot of work because it relies on the getter-setter. I did not find a way to insert custom mapping to a type, that could be generic.
3. Remove RIO and just put in all the code myself instead of relying on RIO.

Maybe someone has some advice?

Answer 1

Thanks Stuart. It was exactly my thought, so I did implement it that way: my (DB) Models do not contain RIO. Only my viewmodels do, and they reference a Model that is DB-compatible.

So, for posterity the following tips: - Do not use RIO in your models that need to be database-backed. - Reference models in your viewmodels. In the binding you can use the . (dot) to reference this model.

This keeps them nicely separated. This gives you also another advantage: if you need to reuse a model (because the same object might be displayed twice on the screen), but under different circumstances, it is much easier to handle this situaties to find this already instantiated model.