ComboBox for Xamarin Overview

Telerik ComboBox for Xamarin allows users to select item/items from a drop down list of items. The control has a number of features such as editing, searching, single and multiple selection, flexible styling API, dropdown customizations and more.

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Figure 1: ComboBox for Xamarin Overview

ComboBox Overview

Key features

  • Editable and NonEditable mode – ComboBox supports both editable and noneditable state. When the control is in edit mode searching can be performed. For more details please check the Editing article.
  • Searching Support – ComboBox provides both case-sensitive and case-insensitive searching modes. The available options are: Contains, StartsWith, ContainsCaseSensitive and StartsWithCaseSensitive. View the Searching article for more details.
  • Single and Multiple Selection Support – ComboBox control has a support for single and multiple selection. You can easily specify the required selection using the SelectionMode property. To learn more about the Selection please check the Single and Multiple Selection topic.
  • Complex Object Support – ComboBox control provides you a way to specify which property of your complex business object to be displayed in the control by setting DisplayMemberPath. Check here for more details how Data Binding works.
  • Search Highlighting Text – ComboBox control highlights the matching text inside the dropdown list based on the given input after searching is performed. For more details check here.
  • Placeholder – The text which is used to give guidance to the end user on what should be entered/searched in the input. The watermark text is displayed when the input field is empty, or the selected item/s is/are cleared. Review the Key Features article.
  • Header and Footer – ComBoBox for Xamarin gives you the ability to add header and footer inside the dropdown list. For this purpose, you will need to define the HeaderTemplate property and the FooterTemplate property. Go to Header and Footer article.
  • UI Virtualization Support - ComboBox supports UI Virtualization which enables you to display large list of items. When the list (positioned inside the drop down part) is scrolled, the ComboBox reuses the existing items to display the relevant data instead of creating new ones.
  • Templates – You can easily change the default ItemTemplate and SelectedItemTemplate. In addition, if the ComboBox is in multiple selection mode, the selected item is displayed inside a token. You can customize the token using the TokenTemplate property. Also, you can customize the ShowMoreTemplate which is visualized inside the ComboBox when the control is not focused and when there is not enough space for all tokens to be displayed. Check here for more detail.
  • Flexible Styling API – Allows you to change the ComboBox background color, Style the control’s dropdown box, change the clear and dropdown buttons. In addition, you can change the Placeholder text color and the Highlighted text color. Check here how you can work with the Styling API.
  • Theming Support - RadComboBox comes with built-in theming support that helps you achieve consistent look with the rest controls from Telerik UI for Xamarin suite. To learn more about this go to Theme Overview topic.
  • Commands Support – ComboBox for Xamarin exposes ClearSelectionCommand that allows you clear the selected item(s) from external UI and SelectAllCommand that allows you to select all items from the source. For more details check here.

SDK Browser and QSF applications contain different examples that show RadComboBox's main features. You can find the applications in the Examples and QSF folders of your local Telerik UI for Xamarin installation.

See Also

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