a while, so many places to store state, a confusing lifecycle and navigation
model. Most of the blog posts I read either detailed tombstoning for
non-MVVM applications, or described how to use or adapt an existing MVVM
framework for the purposes of tombstoning. I only really understood the
ins-and-outs of tombstoning after writing my own simple MVVM application. I
thought I would share this application here in this blog in the hope that it
might help other similarly confused developers!
What is tombstoning?
Mobile phones have limited resources compared to desktop computers, for that
reason most Smartphone OSs limit the number of applications that are
currently loaded into memory and executing. For Windows Phone 7 this limit
is one!
If the user hits the phone start button while you application is running,
the screen lock engages, or you invoke a chooser / launcher from your
application, then your application is terminated. However, when the user
navigates back to your app, the screen unlocks or the chooser / launcher
closed, the user expects to see your application again in its original
state.
To support this, the WP7 OS maintains state information which allows you to
'restore' your application by starting a new application instance and using
this state information to start the application in the same state as the one
which was terminated. For a full overview of this process I would recommend
reading the Execution Model Overview for Windows Phone on MSDN, or the three
part series on the Windows Phone Developer Blog (1), (2), (3).
This probably sounds like a lot of work, and to be honest, it is. You might
be wondering if the new multi-tasking capabilities that the Mango update
will bring (demoed at the MIX11 day 2 keynote and to be released probably
late 2012) will mean the that tombstoning will disappear. I have not seen
any official confirmation one way or the other, however, personally I think
you will still need to tombstone in Mango. It is most likely that the number
of concurrent applications will be limited and applications will still need
to tombstone as a result.
The Example Application
The example application I am using for this blog post is illustrated below.
The application displays a list of tweets, clicking on a tweet displays it
full screen. Twitter applications are the new Hello World!
The ViewModel
The view model is pretty trivial, each tweet is represented by a
FeedItemViewModel:
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public class FeedItemViewModel
{
public FeedItemViewModel()
{
}
public long Id { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public string Author { get; set; }
public DateTime Timestamp { get; set; }
}
The above view model does not change state, so there is no need to implement
INotifyPropertyChanged.
The top-level view model simply exposes a collection of the above feed
items. It also has an Update method which populates this list by querying
Twitter's search API for tweets that contain the #wp7 hashtag:
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public class FeedViewModel
{
// Twitter search for #WP7
private readonly string _twitterUrl =
"http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?rpp=100&&q=%23wp7";
private WebClient _webClient = new WebClient();
private readonly ObservableCollection<FeedItemViewModel> _feedItems =
new
ObservableCollection<FeedItemViewModel>();
public FeedViewModel()
{
_webClient.DownloadStringCompleted += WebClient_DownloadStringCompleted;
}
/// <summary>
/// Parses the response from our twitter request, creating a list of
FeedItemViewModelinstances
/// </summary>
private void WebClient_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender,
DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)
{
var doc = XDocument.Parse(e.Result);
var items = doc.Descendants(AtomConst.Entry)
.Select(entryElement => new FeedItemViewModel()
{
Title =
entryElement.Descendants(AtomConst.Title).Single().Value,
Id =
long.Parse(entryElement.Descendants(AtomConst.ID).Single().Value.Split(':')[2]),
Timestamp =
DateTime.Parse(entryElement.Descendants(AtomConst.Published).Single().Value),
Author =
entryElement.Descendants(AtomConst.Name).Single().Value
});
_feedItems.Clear();
foreach (var item in items)
{
_feedItems.Add(item);
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Gets the feed items
/// </summary>
public ObservableCollection<FeedItemViewModel> FeedItems
{
get { return _feedItems; }
}
/// <summary>
/// Gets a feed item by its Id
/// </summary>
public FeedItemViewModel GetFeedItem(long id)
{
return _feedItems.SingleOrDefault(item => item.Id == id);
}
/// <summary>
/// Update the feed items
/// </summary>
public void Update()
{
_webClient.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(_twitterUrl));
}
}
The View
The FeedView page that is used to render the FeedViewModel (i.e the list of
tweets) is simply a NavigationList control (An ItemsControl optimised for
WP7 navigation scenarious) that has an ItemTemplate which renders each item:
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<Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
<l:NavigationList x:Name="navigationControl"
ItemsSource="{Binding FeedItems}"
Navigation="NavigationList_Navigation">
<l:NavigationList.ItemTemplate>
<DataTemplate>
<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical"
Height="100">
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Author}"
Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}"
Margin="20,0,0,0"
Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextSmallStyle}"
TextWrapping="Wrap"/>
</StackPanel>
</DataTemplate>
</l:NavigationList.ItemTemplate>
</l:NavigationList>
</Grid>
The FeedItemView that is used to render the FeedItemViewModel is even
simpler:
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<Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0">
<StackPanel Orientation="Vertical">
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Author}"
Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextLargeStyle}"
Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneAccentBrush}"/>
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Title}"
Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextLargeStyle}"
TextWrapping="Wrap"/>
</StackPanel>
</Grid>
Now that we have the ViewModels and their respective Views we need to bring
them together by making the ViewModel the DataContext for each View. There
are a number of different ways you can do this (Paul Stovell documents 8
different ways in his MVVM Instantiation Approaches blog post!), however, I
find the simplest approach with WP7 applications is to associated the
ViewModel with the application. Therefore, we add our view model as a
property of the App class and instantiate it when the Application_Launching
method (which handles the Launching lifecycle event) is invoked:
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public partial class App : Application
{
/// <summary>
/// Gets the ViewModel
/// </summary>
public FeedViewModel ViewModel { get; private set; }
...
private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e)
{
ViewModel = new FeedViewModel();
ViewModel.Update();
// set the frame DataContext
RootFrame.DataContext = ViewModel;
}
...
}
The DataContext of the RootFrame is set to our 'top level' view model. The
RootFrame is an instance of PhoneApplicationFrame, which contains the
current PhoneApplicationPage instance, hence when you navigate from one page
to the next the content of the PhoneApplicationFrame is replaced within the
page that has been navigated to. As a result, each of your pages will
inherit the DataContext from the application frame.
Navigation
The DataContext of the RootFrame is inherited by the FeedView page, so once
the tweets are loaded they will be rendered in our NavigationList. In order
to navigate to a tweet when a user clicks on it we need to handle the
Navigation event:
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public partial class FeedView : PhoneApplicationPage
{
...
private void NavigationList_Navigation(object sender, NavigationEventArgs
e)
{
var selectedItem = e.Item as FeedItemViewModel;
// navigate to the feed items page
NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/FeedItemView.xaml?id=" +
selectedItem.Id, UriKind.Relative));
}
}
The above code uses the NavigationService to navigate to the FeedItemView
page. We use the querystring to pass the id of the selected tweet. We could
have passed this information from View the ViewModel by adding a
SelectedItemId property, however, we will find out later that there are some
advantages to using the querystring.
When the FeedItemView page is loaded we need to obtain this id from the
querystring and use it to locate the correct FeedItemViewModel instance.
This is done as follows:
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public partial class FeedItemView : PhoneApplicationPage
{
public FeedItemView()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
protected override void
OnNavigatedTo(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e)
{
base.OnNavigatedTo(e);
// parse the querystring to extract the id
long feedItemId = long.Parse(NavigationContext.QueryString["id"]);
// obtain this item from the view model.
this.DataContext = App.Current.ViewModel.GetFeedItem(feedItemId);
}
}
Tombstoning
With the above code our simple application works just fine, you can navigate
the list of tweets, click on one to see it in the FeedItemView page, then
use the back button to return to the original list of tweets. It would be
great if our job was complete at this point, however, the application fails
miserably if it is tombstoned. To test this, load the application, then hit
the start button, followed by the back button to return to the application.
This is what you are met with:
Tombstoning terminates the application, therefore the ViewModel and all the
state it contains is lost. Hence we return to an empty list.
So how do we fix this?
When your application gets tombstoned a Deactivated event is fired before
your application terminates, and when the user navigates back to your
application, a new instance is created an the Activated event is fired. The
Visual Studio WP7 application template helpfully adds event handlers for
these events on your App class.
Note that when an application is re-activated the Launching event is not
fired, therefore the code we added to construct a new view model is not
executed in this case.
The fix to this problem is rather simple, the framework provides a
PhoneApplicationService class which has a State property which allows you to
store your application state within a dictionary. The WP7 OS will persist
this dictionary of state on your behalf when your application is tombstoned.
You can place anything within this dictionary as long as it is serializable.
Therefore a simple solution to this problem is to simply place our view
model into this dictionary, retrieving it when the application is
re-activated:
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private readonly string ModelKey = "Key";
private void Application_Deactivated(object sender, DeactivatedEventArgs e)
{
PhoneApplicationService.Current.State[ModelKey] = ViewModel;
}
private void Application_Activated(object sender, ActivatedEventArgs e)
{
if (PhoneApplicationService.Current.State.ContainsKey(ModelKey))
{
ViewModel = PhoneApplicationService.Current.State[ModelKey] as
FeedViewModel;
RootFrame.DataContext = ViewModel;
}
}
With this simple change the application now returns to its previous state
when the user hits the back button. Note that this also works when the
application is tombstoned on the FeedItemView page:
This is because when the application is re-activated, the NavigationService
Journal which records the pages that have been visited is also restored. The
'back stack' contains the URI of each page which in our case contains the
query string which holds the Id of the tweet which is currently being
viewed.
Persisting State Between Sessions
In the above example, the application state was saved as tombstoned state.
But what if the user simply hits the back button until they navigate back
out of our application? In this context your application is closed, rather
than tombstoned. The PhoneApplicationService.Current.State dictionary which
we used to store our view model is not persisted in this context. For
long-term persistence you should save your data to the phones isolated
storage.
We can serialize our view model to isolated storage when the application
exits by adding code to the Application_Closing methods which handles the
Closing event. In the example below I am using the framework XmlSerializer,
which is the same serializer which is used to persist data in the
application state dictionary. However, as you have full control over
serialization, you might choose to use a serializer with better performance.
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// Code to execute when the application is closing (eg, user hit Back)
// This code will not execute when the application is deactivated
private void Application_Closing(object sender, ClosingEventArgs e)
{
// persist the data using isolated storage
using (var store = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication())
using (var stream = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("data.txt",
FileMode.Create,
FileAccess.Write,
store))
{
var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(FeedViewModel));
serializer.Serialize(stream, ViewModel);
}
}
The code for launching the application now needs to be modified to first try
and load the data from isolated storage. If no data is found a new view
model is created:
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// Code to execute when the application is launching (eg, from Start)
// This code will not execute when the application is reactivated
private void Application_Launching(object sender, LaunchingEventArgs e)
{
// load the view model from isolated storage
using (var store = IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication())
using (var stream = new IsolatedStorageFileStream("data.txt",
FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Read, store))
using (var reader = new StreamReader(stream))
{
if (!reader.EndOfStream)
{
var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(FeedViewModel));
ViewModel = (FeedViewModel)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
}
}
// if the view model is not loaded, create a new one
if (ViewModel == null)
{
ViewModel = new FeedViewModel();
ViewModel.Update();
}
// set the frame DataContext
RootFrame.DataContext = ViewModel;
}
NOTE: This is no a fully functional twitter application, in a real
application you would probably want to update the data that is loaded from
isolated storage to add the latest tweets, however this blog post is about
tombstoning, not twitter application development!
Tombstoning UI state
So, now our application saves state during tombstoning and to isolated
storage when it exits. Surely we're all done now?
Well … almost.
If you start the application and scroll down the list of tweets, then hit
the start button, tombstoning the application, then hit the back button to
re-activate it our tweets are all there, but our list is scrolled back to
the top again:
Why is this? Well, when you simply navigate back to from one page within
your application to another, the original page is still present in memory
and as a result, any state held by the controls within the application UI is
maintained.
However, as we have seen already, when an application is tombstoned it is
terminated. The only state that remains is that which you manually place
into the State dictionary. Therefore, in order to maintain the scroll
location, which we should do, we need to determine its location and store it
in the tombstone state.
A while back I blogged about exposing a ScrollViewers scroll location as an
attached property in order to permit data binding. This approach could be
used here to bind the scroll location to a property on the view model.
However, in this case I think something a bit more lightweight is more
appropriate.
In the previous sections we have used the application-level code >
PhoneApplicationService.Current.State for storing tombstone state. You can
also store state on a page-level via the PhoneApplicationPage.State
property. This is a much more appropriate place for storing state relating
to UI controls within pages, rather than state which is more closely related
with your applications business logic.
It is still a little tricky to extract the required state information from
list controls. The code below uses Linq-to-VisualTree to locate the
VirtualizingStackPanel that can be used to get / set the scroll position.
The scroll location is placed in the State dictionary when the user
navigates away from the page.
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/// <summary>
/// Gets the NavigationList ItemsPanel
/// </summary>
private VirtualizingStackPanel ItemsPanel
{
get
{
return navigationControl.Descendants<VirtualizingStackPanel>()
.Cast<VirtualizingStackPanel>()
.SingleOrDefault();
}
}
private static readonly string ScrollOffsetKey = "ScrollOffsetKey";
protected override void
OnNavigatedFrom(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e)
{
base.OnNavigatedFrom(e);
// persist the scroll position within the page state
var scroll = ItemsPanel;
if (scroll != null)
{
State[ScrollOffsetKey] = ItemsPanel.ScrollOwner.VerticalOffset;
}
}
Restoring this state is simply a matter of checking for the existence of
this key in the State dictionary when the page is navigated to:
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protected override void
OnNavigatedTo(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e)
{
base.OnNavigatedTo(e);
// restore the scroll position
this.Loaded += (s, e2) =>
{
if (State.ContainsKey(ScrollOffsetKey))
{
var scroll = ItemsPanel;
if (scroll != null)
{
ItemsPanel.SetVerticalOffset((double)State[ScrollOffsetKey]);
}
}
};
}
Note that the state is restored after the Loaded event is fired because the
VirtualizingStackPanel which manages the scroll location is defined within
the NavigationList template and hence will not be present in the visual tree
when the page is not initially constructed (the same is true if you use a
ListBox as well).
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