Pop-ups

Pop-ups are a special case in Fabulous for Xamarin.Forms: they are part of the view, but don’t follow the same lifecycle as the rest of the UI. In Xamarin.Forms pop-ups are exposed through 2 methods of the current page: DisplayAlert and DisplayActionSheet.

In Fabulous for Xamarin.Forms we only describe what a page should look like and have no access to UI elements. As such, there is no direct implementation of those 2 methods in Fabulous but instead we can use the static property Application.Current.MainPage exposed by Xamarin.Forms.

Here is an example of the use of a confirmation pop-up - note the requirement of Cmd.AsyncMsg so as not to block on the UI thread:

type Msg =
    | DisplayAlert
    | AlertResult of bool

let update (msg : Msg) (model : Model) =
    match msg with
    | DisplayAlert ->
        let alertResult = async {
            let! alert =
                Application.Current.MainPage.DisplayAlert("Display Alert", "Confirm", "Ok", "Cancel")
                |> Async.AwaitTask
            return AlertResult alert }

        model, Cmd.ofAsyncMsg alertResult

    | AlertResult alertResult -> ... // Do something with the result

Why don’t we add a Fabulous wrapper for those? Doing so would only end up duplicating the existing methods and compel us to maintain these in sync with Xamarin.Forms. See Pull Request #147 for more information