MAUI/Blazor Hybrid App

[rshuck]

I presume the issue is because I am new to CSLA that although I am able to create MAUI or Blazor apps I have been banging my head against the wall trying to create a hybrid app as am unable to figure out how to setup the CSLA classes for injection into Blazor.

Would you be able to point in the right direction by sharing a MauiProgram.cs or where I maybe able to find an example?

The only thing I can think would work would be to have MAUI be the host for a HTML viewer and all the Blazor rendering happening on a server.

[rockfordlhotka]

Here's a link to a real project built as a hybrid:

https://github.com/missingchildrenmn/KidsIdKit

[rockfordlhotka]

Sorry, at one point that project did use CSLA, and then we shifted to a different strategy.

In short, you put the services.UseCsla() call in the MauiProgram.cs, along with any other service registrations required by your app (for DAL, etc.).

Beyond that, once MAUI has bootstrapped the app into Blazor, everything you do should be just like a regular Blazor app. The only oddity, which is usually entirely invisible, is that your code isn't running in aspnetcore and it is not running in WebAssembly. It is running natively compiled in .NET. I haven't found this to impact anything, other than when trying to reference other NuGet packages to do interesting things on the client - you always need to confirm that any NuGet package you reference works in MAUI on your target platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac).

The MAUI Community Toolkit is a great resource, because it does have a lot of components that work across platforms, and you can usually use the non-visual parts of that toolkit from Blazor code. Obviously their visual parts are for XAML/MAUI - but the underlying concepts like accessing files and other device peripherals often work from Blazor.

[Bowman74]

I second what @rockfordlhotka said. The setup should be very similar to a Blazor WASM app. It will likely use a remote data portal or similar if the data is retrieved and set server side, so that would be a separate deployment.

If you have local data or resources you want to deal with you would deviate from a standard Blazor WASM app. You would no longer go after a browser database like IndexedDB but instead using something like SQlite. Similarly instead of using HTML5 APIs to access things like the camera, you would use the MAUI abstractions over the native device APIs.

Let me know if you need any help. I'm happy to help you get it working.

[rshuck]

I have started with the Visual Studio 2022 template .NET MAUI Blazor Hybrid and Web app and at this point am just using local data, so to all intents and purposes it is two seperate apps sharing a set of common Blazor pages.

The web app runs as expected however the Maui app required some tweaks I don't like to get running and after looking through the CSLA code to find the correct solution to the problems am sure I must have some scaffolding wrong.

in the razor pages I have had add a platform check

    protected override async Task OnInitializedAsync()
    {
        if (formFactor.GetFormFactor().ToLowerInvariant() == "web")
            await StateManager.InitializeAsync();
        await vm.RefreshAsync(() => productListPortal.FetchAsync("Red",20));
    }

and in the program i have had to add a dummy httpclient service otherwise the DataPortal was unresolvable.

builder.Services.AddScoped(sp => new HttpClient { BaseAddress = new Uri("http://nowhere") });

[Bowman74]

@rshuck
Hard to know what is going on unless you share how you are registering CSLA with the builder in CreateMauiApp().

[rockfordlhotka]

When you configured the data portal did you tell it to use HttpProxy? That proxy does require an HttpClient instance to talk to the data portal server. By default, if you don't explicitly configure the data portal proxy, it should default to LocalProxy, which means that the "server-side" data portal runs on the client device so you can store data on the local device. That proxy should not require an HttpClient.

When you say you need to check for "web", is this because you are using the MAUI Hybrid template that does both MAUI and a web UI? So the Blazor app might run native on devices or be running in a web scenario?