Xamarin Forms UWP / UAP Broad File System Access (Permissions)

by | Jan 26, 2019 | Forms, UAP/UWP, Xamarin

For a long time now, I have wanted to access the file system when I create a Xamarin Forms UAP/UWP application but that was actually impossible … till now. After the Windows 10 build 17134 update its possible to access the broad file system, the approach is not straight forward.

To gain access to the file system in your Xamarin Forms UAP/UWP application follow these steps

1) Go the properties of your UAP/UWP application and check the targeting, the minimum should be at least 16299, what I recommend is 171344

You can also change the targets unloading the project and editing the csproj file

2) In your solution explorer edit your Package.appxmanifest by selecting it and press F7, looking the file from the top should look like the image below

Add this namespace xmlns:rescap=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/appx/manifest/foundation/windows10/restrictedcapabilities and update the IgnorableNamesSpaces like this IgnorableNamespaces=”uap mp rescap” after the changes your file should look like the image below

3) Lookup for the capabilities node in the manifest and add a new capability  <rescap:Capability Name=”broadFileSystemAccess” /> your capabilities section should look like the image below

4) Rebuild your application, then select it on the solution explorer, right click over it and click on deploy, this will register the application in your OS

5) on your Windows OS go to settings>File system privacy settings and you will see all the UAP/UWP applications that are registered  in your OS and have access to the file system, here you can allow/deny the access to the file system in general or by application

6) now everything is ready for your app to access the file system, but there is a little catch, in most cases, you cannot use the classes in system.io to access the file system you have to use Windows.Storage.Storagefolder below is a code snippet that illustrates how to use such class

public async void GetDirectories(string sDir)
{
    
    var folder = await StorageFolder.GetFolderFromPathAsync(sDir);   
    foreach (var file in await folder.GetFilesAsync())
    {
        Debug.WriteLine(file.Name);
        
    }

}

 

I have created a sample app using these steps, you can download the source from GitHub

 

 

 

 

 

How to install all the nuget references to run XPO with SQLite on Xamarin Android, iOS and Forms with a single package

by | Sep 18, 2018 | Nuget, Xamarin, XPO

When I got the news that XPO will run on DotNetCore, NetStandard and Xamarin I was super excited about all the new possibilities and to be able to port all the years of experience with XPO to the Xamarin platform.

A few days after the announcement of XPO being able to run on DotNetCore and NetStandard developer express publish a video tutorial and the source on GitHub.

As always like in any video tutorial most of the setup steps are not shown, so you need to do a little research to make your personal project work and I would say most of the time these steps are not that obvious.

I decided to test XPO on Xamarin forms and save data on an SQLite database, so as with every Xamarin project the first step is to install all the necessary nuggets for your project. So, to make it easier for myself I check the source code that DevExpres publish and I was surprised about how many references you need to run SQLite on both Android and iOS platforms. If you want to check the complete list of nuget references needed, click on the following links

To set up all the nuggets reference on both platforms took me around 15 minutes which I think it’s a lot, but then I said, “it does not matter, you only have to do this once right”… well no, since I was so excited that XPO is now able to run on Xamarin I started to create a lot of test projects and migrate some old projects too and every time I have to run to the process of install all the nuggets references.

So, to make my life easier I decided to create a NuGet package with all the references for each platform so here they are

On iOS you will need to add the following lines to your application class inside of the main method

//Initialize SQLite with the sqlite3 provider

SQLitePCL.Batteries_V2.Init();

I hope both Nugets will save you time when you start using XPO on Xamarin