eXpressApp Framework - Tips & Tricks (December 2020)

This is the last edition of XAF Tips & Tricks in 2020. We certainly hope the information we published during the course of the year was of value/benefit to you. If you’d like us to improve these tips & tricks posts in 2021, feel free and post your thoughts below.

Happy New Year – our best wishes for a healthy and prosperous new year.

Documentation Updates

• In the following topic, we demonstrate how to use XAF's role-based access control API in a  Xamarin Forms app. Remember, our security API can be used in any .NET app, not just XAF-powered apps. If you have colleagues in need of a robust .NET security API, please share this post.  
• We published a one hour video about the best ways to access and manipulate data in XAF/XPO-powered apps. This video should be of great help to those who are new to XAF. Thanks to our MVPs, Jose Columbie and Joche Ojeda for their assistance in producing this video.
  
  
• We updated the following KB article FAQ: XAF ASP.NET Core Blazor Server UI with additional examples of custom XAF property editors. These examples demonstrate XAF’s broad UI customization capabilities. For instance, the articles includes use of new editors for color and file attachment properties (based on DevExpress Blazor and DevExtreme JavaScript components).
• In this topic, we show you how to access standard ASP.NET Core services from XAF's View Controllers in Blazor UI through ((BlazorApplication)Application).ServiceProvider.GetRequiredService<YourService>(): 
     - IConfiguration - to read configuration keys like connection strings from appsettings.json (XAF integration example);
     - NavigationManager - to navigate to a required URL or download a file programmatically (XAF integration example);
     - IJSRuntime - to call JavaScript methods from .NET code - for instance,  in  custom editors (XAF integration example).
• If you are new to XAF's Blazor UI, please be sure to check out our getting started tutorials and demos:  In-Depth XAF Blazor UI Tutorial (Main Demo)  |  Basic Blazor Tutorial (Simple Project Manager Demo)  |  Online Demo.
• If you search XAF's Blazor documentation at https://docs.devexpress.com/eXpressAppFramework/, be sure to select .NET Standard or .NET Core using the top left selector (certain APIs and topics are not available under the default .NET Framework selector).
  
  
  
• When you create a new XAF ticket in the DevExpress Support Center and select XAF under the Platform/Product field, you will see a panel with useful help links at the bottom. These links will offer guidance on how to collect callstacks, logs and other important information about any .NET error. With this information in hand, you’ll get faster and more accurate responses from our support team.
  
  
  
• Did you know that you can place the cursor on a DevExpress API in the Visual Studio code editor and hit F1 to view relevant help topics directly within your web browser? For instance, go to one of your View Controllers, find and focus `CreateListView` or 'FindObject' and press F1. Many help topics include code examples that you can copy - a potential time saver. This DevExpress feature is already a part of the product installation - it does not require a separate installation of our offline docs.
  
  What do you think about this F1 capability? What are your habits with regard to API reference search in 2021? For instance, do you use search.devexpress.com, https://docs.devexpress.com/search/?query=findobject&project=eXpressAppFramework or always google by default?