Making a TabBar or SegmentedControl in .NET MAUI

This is the experience I just created for a little demo app I'm building with .NET MAUI. Component vendors like Syncfusion and Progress ship SegmentedControls that do this and probably more, but I wanted to see what it would be like to use "in the box" controls. I'm really happy with the result and how easy it was to code. This probably took me 10 minutes.

What I used:

The first two "controls" are really the heart of the solution. The rest are just needed for layout/design.

• RadioButton
• BindableLayout
• HorizontalStackLayout
• Grid - perhaps I could have used a VerticalStackLayout, but Grid gives me great flexibility
• Label
• BoxView - I like this simple control for painting lines or boxes that need to size to the parent container

The Code

1 - I created my container with a set of data to be repeated for each tab.

<HorizontalStackLayout>
    <BindableLayout.ItemTemplate>
    <!-- Views Here -->
    </BindableLayout.ItemTemplate>
    <BindableLayout.ItemsSource>
        <x:Array Type="{x:Type x:String}">
            <x:String>Hot Dishes</x:String>
            <x:String>Cold Dishes</x:String>
            <x:String>Soups</x:String>
            <x:String>Appetizers</x:String>
            <x:String>Desserts</x:String>
        </x:Array>
    </BindableLayout.ItemsSource>
</HorizontalStackLayout>

2 - I created the item template to display a RadioButton.

<BindableLayout.ItemTemplate>
    <DataTemplate>
        <RadioButton Content="{Binding .}" />
    </DataTemplate>
</BindableLayout.ItemTemplate>

To make this a grouped list of radios, I added a name to the parent layout.

<HorizontalStackLayout 
    RadioButtonGroup.GroupName="MenuCategories">

3 - I styled the RadioButton using a ControlTemplate.

<RadioButton Content="{Binding .}">
    <RadioButton.ControlTemplate>
        <ControlTemplate>
            <Grid RowDefinitions="30,4">
                <Label Text="{TemplateBinding Content}" />
                <BoxView Grid.Row="1" Color="Transparent"/>
            </Grid>
        </ControlTemplate>
    </RadioButton.ControlTemplate>
</RadioButton>

Because we are inside of a control template, rather than using Binding I use TemplateBinding. The Content could be anything, but I supplied a String so it seems safe to bind that directly to the label text.

4 - To get the different look for selected vs unselected, I:

• added a VisualStateManager (VSM) to the control template layout
• gave my lable and box names so I could target them from the VSM
• styled the checked and unchecked states (odd naming ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

<ControlTemplate>

    <Grid RowDefinitions="30,4">

        <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups>

            <VisualStateGroupList>

                <VisualStateGroup x:Name="CheckedStates">

                    <VisualState x:Name="Checked">

                        <VisualState.Setters>

                            <Setter

                                TargetName="TextLabel"

                                Property="Label.TextColor"

                                Value="{StaticResource Primary}"/>

                            <Setter

                                TargetName="Indicator"

                                Property="BoxView.Color"

                                Value="{StaticResource Primary}"/>

                        </VisualState.Setters>

                    </VisualState>

                &lt;VisualState x:Name="Unchecked"&gt;
                    &lt;VisualState.Setters&gt;
                        &lt;Setter
                            TargetName="TextLabel"
                            Property="Label.TextColor"
                            Value="White"/&gt;
                        &lt;Setter
                            TargetName="Indicator"
                            Property="BoxView.Color"
                            Value="Transparent"/&gt;
                    &lt;/VisualState.Setters&gt;
                &lt;/VisualState&gt;
            &lt;/VisualStateGroup&gt;
        &lt;/VisualStateGroupList&gt;
    &lt;/VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups&gt;
    &lt;Label Text="{TemplateBinding Content}" x:Name="TextLabel" /&gt;
    &lt;BoxView x:Name="Indicator" Grid.Row="1" Color="Transparent"/&gt;
&lt;/Grid&gt;



    

    




</ControlTemplate>

Conclusion

That's it. There are a lot of useful concepts in this example that made implementing it super easy. I hope learned at least one new thing to use in .NET MAUI.

Comments

[radioActive DROID]

I've been trying to implement something like this in C# with no luck, any suggestion will be appreciated.

public class SegmentView : Border {
    readonly string[] items = { "Pending", "Confirmed", "Completed" };

    class SegmentButton : Button {
        public SegmentButton() => this.Margins(0, 0, 8, 0);
    }

    public SegmentView() {
        Padding = 3;
        Margin = 8;
        StrokeShape = new RoundRectangle {
            CornerRadius = new CornerRadius(10)
        };
        SetDynamicResource(BackgroundColorProperty, "Tertiary");
        var layout = new HorizontalStackLayout()
            .ItemsSource(items)
            .ItemTemplate(new DataTemplate(() => new RadioButton {
                ControlTemplate = new ControlTemplate(() => new SegmentButton()
                    .Bind(Button.TextProperty, "Content", source: RelativeBindingSource.TemplatedParent))
            }.Bind(RadioButton.ContentProperty)));
        RadioButtonGroup.SetGroupName(layout, "MenuGroup");
        var vsGroups = new VisualStateGroup() {
            Name = "CheckedStates",
        };
        vsGroups.States.Add(new VisualState {
            Name = "Checked",
            Setters = {
                new Setter { TargetName = nameof(SegmentButton), Property = Button.BackgroundColorProperty, Value = Colors.Indigo }
            }
        });
        vsGroups.States.Add(new VisualState {
            Name = "Unchecked",
            Setters = {
                new Setter { TargetName = nameof(SegmentButton), Property = Button.BackgroundColorProperty, Value = Colors.Transparent },
                new Setter { TargetName = nameof(SegmentButton), Property = Button.TextColorProperty, Value = Colors.Indigo }
            }
        });
        VisualStateManager.SetVisualStateGroups(layout,
                new VisualStateGroupList {

                }
            );
        Content = layout;
    }
}

[Sikandar Amla]

Simple, clean, elegant