Xamarin iOS - Multiple dynamically sized UIWebViews - ios

Question

I'm having an issue asynchronously loading several UIWebViews into one Section. I'm using MonoTouch.Dialog to generate the UI. I am loading data from a blog and showing 10 items which consist of an image plus some HTML text. What's happening is that the posts are not all showing up and the ones that are showing up are out of order. Here's what I'm doing:
public partial class BlogViewController : DialogViewController
{
private Section mainSection;
public BlogViewController () : base (UITableViewStyle.Grouped, null)
{
Root = new RootElement ("");
mainSection = new Section ("");
mainSection.Add(new ActivityElement ());
Root.Add (mainSection);
}
public override void ViewDidLoad()
{
base.ViewDidLoad ();
new Thread (new ThreadStart(PopulateBlog)).Start ();
}
private void PopulateBlog ()
{
var posts = service.GetPosts (currentOffset, 10);
InvokeOnMainThread (delegate {
foreach (var post in posts) {
//grab an appropriate image size
var altSize = post.photos [0].alt_sizes.Where (x => x.width < 401).OrderByDescending(x => x.width).FirstOrDefault ();
if (altSize != null) {
var img = LoadImageFromUri(altSize.url);
//scale the image, not really important
var imageView = new UIImageView (new RectangleF (0, 0, screenWidth, height));
imageView.Image = img;
var content = new UIWebView ();
//When the HTML finishes rendering figure out the size and add it to the section. Apparently can't figure the size ahead of time?
content.LoadFinished += (sender, e) =>
{
var contentHeight = Int32.Parse (content.EvaluateJavascript ("document.getElementById('content').offsetHeight;"));
content.Frame = new RectangleF (0, height + 10, screenWidth, contentHeight + 10);
//dynamically size this view to fit the content
var view = new UIView
(new RectangleF (0, 0,
screenWidth,
height + contentHeight));
view.AddSubview (content);
view.AddSubview (imageView);
//add the view to the Section which is later added to the Root
mainSection.Add(view);
};
var htmlString = #"some HTML here";
content.LoadHtmlString(someHtml);
content.ScrollView.ScrollEnabled = false;
content.ScrollView.Bounces = false;
}
}
});
Root.Reload(mainSection, UITableViewRowAnimation.None);
}
}
I'm guessing that A) the LoadFinished events are not happening in the same order that they are queued up, and that B) The Root.Reload gets called before they all fire. I tried spinning with a Thread.Sleep prior to the Root.Reload but then the LoadFinished events never even get fired.
I also tried putting all of the UIView elements in a Dictionary to be added after they are all populated but it seems like as soon as InvokeOnMainThread ends the LoadFinished event handler never gets called again.

Answer 1

Do you have to use MT.Dialog? I would personal try to use UITableView instead. Load the web view content, determine its size (maybe use sizeThatFits?) and push it to the data source at correct location. Then return the size on the UITableViewDelegate's heightForRowAtIndexPath call. UITableView should take care of the rest.