Daniel Hindrikes

If you're building an iOS app you maybe want to add content to the NavigationBar. This blog post will show you how to build a generic solution so you don't have to write a custom renderer for each view that you want NavigationBar content for.

First of all I creating a new class that inherits from ContentPage and adding a property of type View. I use to name the property TitleView, because that's the name in iOS.

public class ExtendedContentPage : Xamarin.Forms.ContentPage
{
    public View TitleView { get; set; }
}

Now If your views/pages inherits from your new class you can add content to TitleView.

To get it work you also have to write a custom page renderer for iOS. Override the WillMoveToParentViewController method in the renderer that will inherit PageRenderer and add the code below.

 base.WillMoveToParentViewController(parent);

 var page = (ExtendedContentPage)Element;

 var renderer = RendererFactory.GetRenderer(page.TitleView);
 var view = renderer.NativeView;
 view.SizeToFit();

 parent.NavigationItem.TitleView = view.Subviews[0];

It is important that you adding the first subview of the native view, otherwise it will be just blank.

The complete code can be found on GitHub, https://github.com/dhindrik/XamarinFormsSamples/tree/master/TitleView