MvvmCross passing configuration to configurable plugin loader

Question

I am creating a portable MockGeoLocationWatcher that one can substitute in place of the concrete implementations of IMvxGeoLocationWatcher until one has an actual device. This should facilitate development and testing of applications that require geo location.

The PluginLoader class for this plugin currently looks like this:

namespace Pidac.MvvmCross.Plugins.Location
{
    public class PluginLoader : IMvxConfigurablePluginLoader
    {
        private bool _loaded;
        public static readonly PluginLoader Instance = new PluginLoader();

        public void EnsureLoaded()
        {
            if (_loaded)
                return;

            _loaded = true;


            var locationWatcher = new MockGeoLocationWatcher();

            var data = @"<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<WindowsPhoneEmulator xmlns='http://schemas.microsoft.com/WindowsPhoneEmulator/2009/08/SensorData'>
    <SensorData>
        <Header version='1' />
        <GpsData latitude='48.619934106826' longitude='-84.5247359841114' />
        <GpsData latitude='48.6852544862377' longitude='-83.9864059059864' />
        <GpsData latitude='48.8445703681025' longitude='-83.7337203591114' />
        <GpsData latitude='48.8662561090809' longitude='-83.2393355934864' />
        <GpsData latitude='49.0825970371386' longitude='-83.0415816872364' />
        <GpsData latitude='49.2621642999055' longitude='-82.7229781716114' />
        <GpsData latitude='49.2621642999055' longitude='-82.6021285622364' />
        <GpsData latitude='49.2047736379815' longitude='-82.3054977028614' />
    </SensorData>
</WindowsPhoneEmulator>";

            locationWatcher.SensorLocationData = data;
            Mvx.RegisterSingleton(typeof(IMvxGeoLocationWatcher), locationWatcher);
        }

        public void Configure(IMvxPluginConfiguration configuration)
        {

        }
    }

    public class MockLocationWatcherConfiguration : IMvxPluginConfiguration
    {
        public static readonly MockLocationWatcherConfiguration Default = new MockLocationWatcherConfiguration();

        // ideally, we should use this property to point to a file or string containing location data
        // this should be configurable outside of code base.
        public string SensorLocationData { get; set; }
    }
}

I will like to pass the sensor data, currently hardcoded into the variable called "data" through an instance of MockLocationWatcherConfiguration but do not know where the MvvmCross framework is expecting to load the configuration for this plugin before IMvxConfigurablePluginLoader.Configure(configuration) is invoked. Ideally, I should specify this through configuration.

I looked at the Json plugin's implementation of PluginLoaded but still could not figure out where the configuration was retrieved before a cast was attempted in IMvxConfigurablePluginLoader.Configure.

Any ideas or pointers will be greatly appreciated.

TIA.

Answer 1

This is covered in the draft wiki page https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross/wiki/MvvmCross-plugins - see "writing a configurable plugin"