define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true); Xamarin – unFocus Projects – Kevin Newman and Ken Newman

SVGView for Xamarin.Android

Instead of making dozens of PNG files for all the various screen sizes for icon assets, I wanted to use vector graphics (such as SVG) in an Android app I’m building with Xamarin.Android. There is a tool for generating images, and that’s better than nothing, but SVG is even easier, and I’m all about easier. I thought this would be relatively easy to do, but it turns out Android has no built in support for vector image formats.

Xamarin has a nice binding project and sample for using an SVG library (I think it wraps SVG-Android on GitHub) in Android apps, but it wasn’t clear how to use that, and there was an annoying gotcha I hit along the way, that I thought I’d document here.

There are two projects in the sample solution. One is the library project, and the other is a sample project, with sample art that you can build to see it working. What we want to do is build the library, and then copy the necessary components into our own Android app project. Here’s how to do that using Xamarin Studio.

  1. Download and unzip the project files from Xamarin (or fork it on GitHub). Open the Solution in Xamarin Studio. You should see something like this:
  2. Put the build mode into “Release” and then right click (or control click) on SvgAndroid (Highlighted in the screenshot above), and then click Build SvgAndroid (or highlight the project and press cmd+K). This will make a release .dll file (a .NET assembly) in the bin folder:
  3. You’ll need to copy two files into your own project. SvgAndroid.dll from bin/Release, and svg-android-1.1.jar from the Jars folder. I put SvgAndroid.dll file in the project/Assemblies folder in in my project hierarchy so that the dll could be managed in git with the rest of my project (the git rule of thumb – include what you need to build, and I need this dll to build the app). The jar file – svg-android-1.1.jar – went into the project/Jars folder.
  4. Add the assembly to the project: Right click on references in the Solution panel, and choose “Edit References.” In there, add the .dll under the “.Net Assemblies” tab.
  5. Add the jar file: Add the jar file to your project using add file or add folder (to add the entire Jars folder). Then right click the jar file, and choose “Build Action” -> “AndroidJavaLibrary” to make sure it gets packaged with your application.

That’s it! Those two files are all you need. Now you can create an SVGView class, and use that in your axml layouts. Here’s a quick and dirty example of the class:

[csharp]using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using Android.App;
using Android.Content;
using Android.OS;
using Android.Runtime;
using Android.Util;
using Android.Views;
using Android.Widget;
using Com.Larvalabs.Svgandroid;

namespace unFocus
{
public class SVGView : ImageView
{
protected string svgSrc;
public string SVGSrc {
get {
return svgSrc;
}
set {
svgSrc = value;
setupSVG ();
}
}

public SVGView (Context context) :
base (context)
{
Initialize ();
}

public SVGView (Context context, IAttributeSet attrs) :
base (context, attrs)
{
Initialize (attrs);
}

public SVGView (Context context, IAttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) :
base (context, attrs, defStyle)
{
Initialize (attrs);
}

void Initialize ()
{
}

void Initialize (IAttributeSet attrs)
{
var a = Context.ObtainStyledAttributes(attrs, Resource.Styleable.SVGView);
SVGSrc = a.GetString(Resource.Styleable.SVGView_svgSrc);
a.Recycle ();
}

void setupSVG ()
{
// svg-android doesn’t work in hardware mode, so set software
SetLayerType (LayerType.Software, null);

if (null == SVGSrc)
return;
SVG svg = SVGParser.GetSVGFromAsset (Context.Assets, SVGSrc);
SetImageDrawable (svg.CreatePictureDrawable ());
Invalidate ();
}
}
}[/csharp]

And in values/attrs.xml:

[xml]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<resources>
    <declare-styleable name="SVGView">
        <attr name="svgSrc" format="string"></attr>
    </declare>
</resources>[/xml]

Now you can create SVGViews in axml using:

[xml]<unFocus.SVGView
   android:svgSrc="svg/somesvgfile.svg"
   android:layout_width="58.0dp"
   android:layout_height="58.0dp"
   android:id="@+id/icon" />[/xml]

SVG files go in the Assets folder, in whatever tree you want. In this example, they are in Assets/svg/. Build action for svg files is “AndroidAsset,” which should be the default.

There is an irritating gotcha, that’ll have you tearing your hair out if you don’t know about it.

SVG files MUST have width and height attributes on the root element to work with this library. If you don’t have them, and Adobe Illustrator CC doesn’t add them by default, the lib will fail with cryptic error messages. The fix is easy enough, just open the SVG in Xamarin and add width and height attributes. There will already be a viewBox attribute with the correct attributes (viewBox=”0 0 70 70″ <– the second two, width and height). You’ll need to add these: width=”70px” height=”70px”.

Update: One other thing I forgot to mention – this didn’t work on the Xamarin Alpha for some reason. The SVGAndroid binding was failing if I remember correctly (at least that’s where the runtime  errors seemed to originate). So if you are having trouble getting this to work, it might be something in the Alpha channel.

Update 2: What I’ve showed you here will work, but some folks on the Xamarin forums suggest there may be advantages to including third party code in alternative ways (like including an entire project, etc.). Have a read.

Update 3: SVG-Android won’t work under hardware acceleration, which is enabled by default in apps targetting Android 3.0 and newer. You just get a blank space. The easiest way around this is to set the Application, Activity, or the specific view you are working on to use software acceleration.

I modified the SVGView example above to do this automatically, but you can also do it yourself (using the code above) or by setting the android:layerType=”software” on the specific view (or somethings its parent).

This is worth knowing about because other types of drawables (such as animations) seem to display other types of incompatibilities with hardware acceleration (such as fuzzy low resolution renderings), and setting software mode can fix it.

Enjoy!

Compiling Mono (and PlayScript) on OSX Mountain Lion (10.8)

Quick update/note: Zynga has pulled the source for PlayScript, and no one has taken it up. Safe to assume it’s a dead project.

A while back, Zynga employees demonstrated a project they are working on called PlayScript, an implementation of AS3 and an ASNext wish-list language they named PlayScript on the Mono Platform. In order to play with it, it’s probably best to compile your own copy, since any binaries they post will quickly get out of date. Wanting to play around with it on my iPhone, I took a stab at compiling the Mono Project on OSX, for use in Xamarin Studio. I used a copy of PlayScript-mono for this post, but these instruction should really apply to any fork of Mono (I think).

The OSX compile instruction page on Mono-Project.com is a bit hard to follow if you are new to this stuff, so I thought I’d write up some more detailed instructions in the hope it would save someone some time.

First, the prerequisites. You’ll need Xcode, and the command line tools. Grab Xcode out of the Mac App Store, and run it. Then go to Preferences under the Xcode menu, then the Downloads Tab/button/icon (organizationally, it’s tab, but it looks like a button with an icon). In there, you should install “Command Line Tools”. This contains some of the stuff you’ll need to build Mono on OSX.

The build instructions on mono-project.com say you’ll need a version of mono installed before you can compile. I had Xamarin and Unity3D installed before I tried to build, and one of them seemed to cover my bases.

There are a couple of prereqs still missing. From various sources, it looks like the make and autoconf tools used to be included with Xcode’s command line package, but they aren’t anymore in OSX 10.8 (Mtn Lion). There are a couple of ways to install them, including building them yourself, but the easiest way I found is to use Brew. Installing Brew is easy enough – copy the ruby command from the brew website, and run it in a terminal.

I always recommend going to the primary source for the correct install method on these kinds of things, so go there, install, and then come back.

Next, use brew to install automake, autoconf, and libtool. You don’t need “sudo” – but don’t worry, brew will complain if you forget. You’ll get a message about libtool being prefixed with a g to avoid conflicts – this didn’t seem to have any unwanted effect for building Mono.

brew install autoconf libtool automake

Note: I had trouble with brew install and libtool on a new mac while writing this post. I didn’t have this problem when I built it on an older iMac. I’m not sure what caused it, but if you get any errors during the brew step (mine was about linking libtool) you can type “brew doctor” in the build directory, and it’ll give you some pointers. My specific problem was that /usr/local/lib wasn’t owned by my user account. The brew suggestion was to “chown” that dir, and rerun the link command for libtool (the step that failed during install), so this was the command I used to fix my brew libtool problem:

sudo chown $USER /usr/local/lib
brew link libtool

There were some other notes about rearranging things in your path for git, etc., but I didn’t bother with any of that.

Now we are ready to compile Mono. The first thing you need to do is download a copy of the Mono source from somewhere. A mainline mono archive or SVN checkout would work, or you could clone a local copy of PlayScript-mono from GitHub, then go inside the folder, which is what I did:

git clone https://github.com/playscript/playscript-mono.git
cd playscript-mono

Now we are up to the configure stage, which is where you will start to run into trouble if you don’t have the proper prerequisites setup. The instructions on mono-project say you can use ./configure from a tar, but I wasn’t able to get that to work from either git or tarball. ./autogen.sh seemed to work from both sources though. Note: the prefix flag is where Mono will be installed when you run “make install” and unless you know what you are doing, you probably don’t want to leave that as the default value. Here’s the bolded warning from mono-project, “It is strongly advised not to install Mono from source in /usr, /usr/local or any other “standard” directories unless you know what you are doing.” I put mine in a directory matching the repo name I’m building from my user directory.

./autogen.sh –prefix=/users/{kevin}/mono-playscript –enable-nls=no
make
make install

This can take a LONG time!