The other day I spoke a little about some of the features included in Csla.Axml.Android.  Another feature it gives you is an easy way to pass a copy of a CSLA object between activities without doing a lot of work.

As you may know when moving from one activity to another in android you cannot simply pass an object by reference.  To get around this you can store a reference of your object in a static variable but global type variables are generally considered anti-patterns.  A better approach is to serialize the object and receive a copy of it in the target activity.  This can be done a variety of ways such as implementing Java.IO.ISerializable, json serialization, etc.  Doing this can lead to varying levels of work on your part.

To serialize and send a copy on a CSLA object from an Activity that inherits from the Csla ActivityBase, use the SeirializeModelForParameter method:

var projectResourceListActivity = new Intent(this, typeof(ProjectResourceList));
projectResourceListActivity.PutExtra(Constants.EditParameter, this.SerilizeModelForParameter());
StartActivity(projectResourceListActivity);

This method takes whatever is in the current view model's model property and serializes it using the mobile formatter.  If you need to send along a different object you can simply pass a reference to it as a parameter in the SerializeModelForParameter(objectIWantToSerialize) command instead.

To reconstitute the object on the target activity you can use a different method on the activity, DeserializeFromParameter.  A good place to do that might be in the activity's OnCreate event:

Library.ProjectEdit projectEdit;
var serializedProjectEdit = Intent.GetByteArrayExtra(Constants.EditParameter);
if (serializedProjectEdit != null)
{
    projectEdit = (Library.ProjectEdit)this.DeserializeFromParameter(serializedProjectEdit);
}

That's all their is too it!