Displaying collections

It is common to have a collection of data and to want to display it in a list, allowing the user to select one or more items and then do some work with those items. There are a couple of ways to do this in .NET MAUI, but the most common (and best) is to use CollectionView.

To see this at work, examine Preferences.xaml along with its code-behind Preferences.xaml.cs and ViewModel, PreferencesViewModel.cs. We will use this page extensively as we build Forget Me Not, but let’s start slowly.

Our goal is to create a list of the user’s preferences (shirt size, music genre, and so on). For that, we’ll use CollectionView, and we’ll, of course, need a collection to view. The page, when completed, will look much like this:

Figure 5.4 – The Preferences page

Rather than each line being a unique object, we’ll create one type that we can show repeatedly. In the Model folder, create a Preference class:

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