How to bind an Android ImageView to an image loaded from Monodroid Assets

From StackOverflow 

Quick answer:

• if your Android image file is stored in assets/images/i1.png
• then make sure it is marked as an AndroidAsset
• then your path needs to be images/i1.png

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Longer answer:

Ideally your ViewModel should be platform independent and not know about View concerns.

So your ViewModel might perhaps expose a property like:

 private GameState _state;
   public GameState State 
   { 
     get { return _state; }
       set { _state = value; RaisePropertyChanged(() => State); }
   }

where GameState is an enumeration like:

 public enum GameState
   {
     Stopped,
       Running,
     Paused,
       GameOver
 }
  

you might then have images representing these states in an assets structure like:

/assets/gamestates/stopped.png
  /assets/gamestates/running.png
  /assets/gamestates/paused.png
  /assets/gamestates/gameover.png
  

where each of those files is marked with BuildAction of AndroidAsset.

To then display the correct image in the UI, you would need a value converter like:

public class GameStateConverter
      : MvxBaseValueConverter
  {
    public override object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)
      {
        return string.Format("gamestates/{0}.png", ((GameState)value).ToString().ToLower());
      }
}

mapped in using a Converters wrapper like:

public class Converters
  {
    public readonly GameStateConverter GameState = new GameStateConverter();
  }

which is configured in setup.cs using:

    protected override IEnumerable<Type> ValueConverterHolders
      {
        get { return new[] { typeof(Converters) }; }
      }

With this in place, then your axml binding statement would be:

    {'AssetImagePath':{'Path':'State', 'Converter':'GameState'}}
  

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For an alternative approach using resources instead of assets, see MvxButtonIconBinding in Іssue with binding to GridLayout to Android