Windows Phone Series – Incremental Loading

Some time back we had a look on doing Incremental Loading with a Windows 8 store app. This same scenario is something that one would come across quite frequently while developing a Windows Phone application too. We have a couple of options in dealing with this while on a Windows phone application. In an ideal case while binding to a large data on a windows phone application, we might be using a LongListSelector or a Listbox control.

While using a LongListSelector, we can use the Link event(if you are using Windows Phone 7.1 toolkit) Or the ItemRealized event(if you are on Windows phone 8.0). Basically we would be doing the same thing in either of these cases, checking the current item that is getting realized and see what is the index of the item in the whole list of data that you have currently and check if its time for you to fetch the next set of data from your data source(possibly a web service). As usual for the sample we will be using the 500px api.

Below is the piece of code that will fetch us the photo from the 500px api to populate the listbox data.

private static int requestPerPage = 20 ; private int currentPage = 1 ; private bool isCurrentlyLoading = false ; private ObservableCollection < Photo > Photos = new ObservableCollection < Photo > ( ) ; private string datasourceUrl = "https://api.500px.com/v1/photos?feature=popular&consumer_key=" + consumerKey + "&rpp=" + requestPerPage . ToString ( ) + "&page={0}" ; private void LoadDataFromSource ( ) { isCurrentlyLoading = true ; var query = string . Format ( datasourceUrl , currentPage ) ; WebClient client = new WebClient ( ) ; client . DownloadStringCompleted += client_DownloadStringCompleted ; client . DownloadStringAsync ( new Uri ( query ) ) ; } void client_DownloadStringCompleted ( object sender , DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e ) { using ( var reader = new MemoryStream ( Encoding . Unicode . GetBytes ( e . Result ) ) ) { var ser = new DataContractJsonSerializer ( typeof ( RootObject ) ) ; RootObject obj = ( RootObject ) ser . ReadObject ( reader ) ; currentPage = obj . current_page + 1 ; if ( obj != null ) { this . Dispatcher . BeginInvoke ( ( ) => { foreach ( var photo in obj . photos ) { Photos . Add ( photo ) ; } isCurrentlyLoading = false ; } ) ; } } }

In the ItemRealized/Link event based on whether you are developing for Windows Phone 7 or 8, below would be the code that goes into that. We need to check the current item that is realized i.e rendered on the UI and see if it is

private void photosList_ItemRealized_1 ( object sender , ItemRealizationEventArgs e ) { Photo photo = e . Container . Content as Photo ; if ( photo != null ) { int offset = 2 ; if ( ! isCurrentlyLoading && Photos . Count - Photos . IndexOf ( photo ) <= offset ) { LoadDataFromSource ( ) ; } } }

In case you want to use a normal listbox, you can do that also. We would need to hook up with VisualStateGroups. This link explains this in details, and I have just reused parts of it as is. We need to override the scrollviewer style to hook into this new StateGroups. We need to look for CompressionBottom state, for the currentstatechanged event of the scrollviewer.

private void myScrollViewer_Loaded_1 ( object sender , RoutedEventArgs e ) { SetScrollViewer ( ) ; } private void SetScrollViewer ( ) { FrameworkElement element = VisualTreeHelper . GetChild ( myScrollViewer , 0 ) as FrameworkElement ; if ( element != null ) { VisualStateGroup vgroup = FindVisualState ( element , "VerticalCompression" ) ; if ( vgroup != null ) { vgroup . CurrentStateChanging += new EventHandler < VisualStateChangedEventArgs > ( vgroup_CurrentStateChanging ) ; } } } private void vgroup_CurrentStateChanging ( object sender , VisualStateChangedEventArgs e ) { if ( e . NewState . Name == "CompressionTop" ) { } if ( e . NewState . Name == "CompressionBottom" ) { if ( ! isCurrentlyLoading ) { LoadDataFromSource ( ) ; } } if ( e . NewState . Name == "NoVerticalCompression" ) { } }

You can use either of these two ways to incrementally load data on a windows phone app. The entire code that is used in this blog is avaialble here. The sample app shows both these methods. The pivot header specifies the method that is used, LongListSelector and Scrollstates

Hope this helps you to incrementally load data on your windows phone application

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