Xamarin.Tip – Dynamic Elevation Frames

How about some more Material Design based controls for Xamarin.Forms?

A while back I wrote about creating more “Material” Frames in your Xamarin.Forms apps using a custom renderer for iOS: Xamarin.Tip – Making Your iOS Frame Shadows More Material

And also wrote about the MaterialButton control I created that added dynamic Elevation properties for both iOS and Android:
Xamarin.Tip – Adding Dynamic Elevation to Your Xamarin.Forms Buttons

And I’ve been getting requests to talk about how to do it with the Frame control in Xamarin.Forms. Spoiler Alert: It’s basically the exact same thing as the MaterialButton…..

Let’s start by creating a custom Frame class in our Xamarin.Forms project:

MaterialFrame.cs

public class MaterialFrame : Frame
{
    public static BindableProperty ElevationProperty = BindableProperty.Create(nameof(Elevation), typeof(float), typeof(MaterialButton), 4.0f);

    public float Elevation
    {
        get
        {
            return (float)GetValue(ElevationProperty);
        }
        set
        {
            SetValue(ElevationProperty, value);
        }
    }
}

We add our bindable Elevation property with a default value of 4.

Now we just need simple custom renderers for our iOS and Android implementations.

Starting with iOS:

MaterialFrameRenderer_iOS.cs

public class MaterialFrameRenderer : FrameRenderer
{
    public static void Initialize()
    {
        // empty, but used for beating the linker
    }
    protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<Frame> e)
    {
        base.OnElementChanged(e);

        if (e.NewElement == null)
            return;
        UpdateShadow();
    }

    protected override void OnElementPropertyChanged(object sender, PropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnElementPropertyChanged(sender, e);
        if(e.PropertyName == "Elevation")
        {
            UpdateShadow();
        }
    }

    private void UpdateShadow()
    {

        var materialFrame = (MaterialFrame)Element;

        // Update shadow to match better material design standards of elevation
        Layer.ShadowRadius = materialFrame.Elevation;
        Layer.ShadowColor = UIColor.Gray.CGColor;
        Layer.ShadowOffset = new CGSize(2, 2);
        Layer.ShadowOpacity = 0.80f;
        Layer.ShadowPath = UIBezierPath.FromRect(Layer.Bounds).CGPath;
        Layer.MasksToBounds = false;

    }
}

And now the simple Android renderer that can use the built in Elevation properties

MaterialFrameRenderer_Android.cs

public class MaterialFrameRenderer : Xamarin.Forms.Platform.Android.AppCompat.FrameRenderer
{
    protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<Frame> e)
    {
        base.OnElementChanged(e);
        if (e.NewElement == null)
            return;

        UpdateElevation();
    }


    private void UpdateElevation()
    {
        var materialFrame= (MaterialFrame)Element;

        // we need to reset the StateListAnimator to override the setting of Elevation on touch down and release.
        Control.StateListAnimator = new Android.Animation.StateListAnimator();

        // set the elevation manually
        ViewCompat.SetElevation(this, materialFrame.Elevation);
        ViewCompat.SetElevation(Control, materialFrame.Elevation);
    }

    protected override void OnElementPropertyChanged(object sender, PropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnElementPropertyChanged(sender, e);
        if(e.PropertyName == "Elevation")
        {
            UpdateElevation();
        }
    }
}

Now with both our renderers, we can reference our MaterialFrame component in our content!

<ContentPage ...>
    <StackLayout>
        <components:MaterialFrame Elevation="6" />
        <components:MaterialFrame Elevation="{Binding SomeNumber}"/>
    </StackLayout>
</ContentPage>

And that’s it! Now you can control the elevation of your frames for both iOS and Android in Xamarin.Forms:

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