In creating an IOBluetooth binding for Xamarin Mac I learned about Objective Sharpie and binding libraries. There is little documentation on this but it is fairly similar to Xamarin iOS and for that there is a lot more source material. The output from Objective Sharpie gives you binding definitions which you can use in a dll project to produce a binding library you can then call from any other Xamarin dll or app. This was fine to a point but there are issues with some of the complex types used and these cannot always be marshalled automatically. This left me with an API with a few missing bits as I tried and failed to manually adjust the binding via trial and error.
The project sat around untouched for some time but recently I’ve begun to revive it and hope to sort out these bits so it can be released as a complete functioning API for Xamarin Mac. At first I thought I was going to have to create two libraries – one with the raw API calls and another with a clean API over the top but I had missed something buried in the docs and it turns out there is an easier solution.
When you have a binding library it will, by default, have two files – ApiDefinition.cs which contains all the API calls and has a Build action of BindingApiDefinition and a StructsAndEnums.cs which contains (well I’ll let you guess from the name) and this has a Build action of ObjcBindingCoreSource. When the classes are generated from the interface definitions in ApiDefinition.cs they are actually partial classes. This means you can extend them and have additional functionality built cleanly into the library. If you have a particularly messy API call you can mark it as internal and then surface it in a more friendly way from a partial class. To do this add another source file to the library project (I’ve called it Extra.cs because I saw that in a sample but the name isn’t important) and set the Build action to Compile. Here you’ll need to create a partial class with the same name and namespace as the “interface” you want to extend from ApiDefinition.cs, and then add methods, properties etc.
The first time I added this my build failed. I subsequently found out that there is one additional step to tell the binding compiler to ignore this file. Open the project properties, under Build select the Objective-C Binding Build page. Here in Additional btouch arguments box add -x:Extra.cs (or replace with your own filenames). This stops the initial binding compilation from using the partial class, which then gets built normally in the subsequent managed code build. The project should now build and expose the combined functionality. I did find that intellisense often gets confused when editing the partial class because there isn’t another definition of a partial class at this time (remember in ApiDefinition.cs it’s actually an interface). However it seems you can safely ignore this!
This in theory allows you to completely change the API surface which you expose to Xamarin from whatever you started with. I don’t want to go too crazy with IOBluetooth – my feeling is that it should match the native API with a few tweaks for C# naming conventions, using namespaces rather than huge class names, and .NET friendly types where appropriate. Objective Sharpie struggled with some of the enum/constant definitions and so these still require a bit of massaging. It should be obvious how it maps to the native API.
If you have feedback on the API or would like to get involved in getting the library up to release standard please let me know. All the current code is on GitHub in the IOBluetooth and IOBluetoothUI folders.
In The Hand Ltd 