XFShimmerLayout

Efficient way to add a shimmering effect to your Xamarin.Forms applications.

Documentation

How To Use

• Add nuget package Xamarin.Essentials to all projects
• Add Init method to App.cs constructor:

InitializeComponent();
var density = Xamarin.Essentials.DeviceDisplay.MainDisplayInfo.Density;
ShimmerLayout.Init(density);

• add reference:

xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:XFShimmerLayout.Controls;assembly=XFShimmerLayout"

• Paste content inside shimmerLayout:

 <controls:ShimmerLayout Angle="-45" GradientSize=".2" IsLoading="True">
    <!--Yours awesome view-->
 </controls:ShimmerLayout>

How it works

Drawing Process

ShimmerLayout processes the visual tree and by using Skia, tries to draw every element.

e.g. if we have included this layout into the ShimmerLayout

<StackLayout Spacing="8">
    <BoxView Margin="16" HeightRequest="20" WidthRequest="100" />

    <BoxView Margin="16" HeightRequest="20" WidthRequest="200" />
</StackLayout>

The ShimmerLayout will create a Canvas Layer above this StackLayout and will draw every VisualElement, except Layouts. In fact, it will create a copy layer of this View (including the right margins and paddings) and draws every VisualElement to this. In the above example, it will draw 2 rectangles.

• The first one as a Rectangle with X = 16, Y = 16, Width = 100, Height = 20
• The second one as a Rectangle with X = 16, Y = 16 + 8(Spacing of StackLayout) + 20(Height of above view), Width = 200, Height = 20

You can have as deep Visual Tree wants, the shimmer layout will draw a right copy of it.

Round Corners and Padding

You can set default CornerRadius and padding of overlay for every element,

<controls:ShimmerLayout 
 CornerRadiusOverlayDefault="10"
 PaddingOverlayDefault="5" />

or set for single element using Attached Property

<controls:ShimmerLayout ... >
<BoxView 
         controls:ShimmerLayout.PaddingOverlay="7,1"
         controls:ShimmerLayout.CornerRadiusOverlay="5"
         ... />
</controls:ShimmerLayout>

Shader

Before drawing the Canvas, we must specify a Shader. We used a LinearGradient Shader.
First of all, we must extract the 2 points from the specified Angle. This can be done with some maths and knowing that the diagonal distance of the triangle is Math.Pow(2, -0.5);. The method that extracts the 2 points from the angle is in SkiaExtensions.cs and called public static IEnumerable<Point> ToPoints(this double angle).

The 2 points that we've got are in the range of [0,1]. So we must convert them to the actual width and height. This can be done easily by multiply e.g. the point with the width or height.

For the Gradient we must got 2 Points, the Start Point and the End Point:

• The Start Point will start from the exported ratio multiplied by the width pixels. Then we must add the X Offset that will be added in order to make the animation happen. Multiply also the ratio for the Y of the start point.
• The End Point must be the X Offset plus the calculated size of the gradient in pixels and then the result must be multiplied with the ratio that we've got from the extension method before. Y must be multiplied, also, with the ratio.

The method that is responsible for the Drawing is the OnMaskCanvasPaintSurface of the ShimmerLayout

Animation

To make the animation happen, we need startX and endX:

• The StartX will be 0 - GradientSizeInPixels
• The EndX will be the Width + GradientSizeInPixels

We created an animation that animates a value from the StartX to EndX and every time we InvalidateSurface of the Canvas.