Xamarin.Forms: ListView inside StackLayout: How to set height?

Question

In a ContentPage I have a ListView inside a StackLayout inside a ScrollView. The ListView is populated (ItemSource is set) in the ContentPage when OnAppearing gets called and I can see that the list is populated in the emulator. The StackLayouts orientation is Vertical and below the ListView I have a Button.

My problem is that no matter how many elements the ListView has, it gets the height of 53.33. I would like the height of the ListView to match the total height of the items in it. By setting HeightRequest I can set the height of the ListView to anything I want, but since I do not know the height of the items inside the ListView the result is most often that the distance to the button below it is incorrect and therefore looks ugly. I have tried to set VerticalOptions on both the ListView and the StackLayout to Startand other settings, but this does not change the height from 53.33 (and if I try to combine using HeightRequest and Start it turns out that HeightRequest wins out).

How can I solve this?

(please excuse the cross posting from Xamarin forum)

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24598261/xamarin-forms-listview-inside-stacklayout-how-to-set-height

Answer 1

The solution in my case was to put the ListView inside a StackLayout and then put that StackLayout inside the main StackLayout. Then I could set the VerticalOptions = LayoutOptions.FillAndExpand on the inner StackLayout (the one containing the ListView) with the result that the ListView got the space it needed (which of course varies depending on the data).

Here is the main code:

listView.ItemsSource = alternativeCells;
listView.ItemSelected += ListViewOnItemSelected;
var listStackLayout = new StackLayout
{
    VerticalOptions = LayoutOptions.FillAndExpand,
    Orientation = StackOrientation.Vertical
};
listStackLayout.Children.Add(listView);
_stackLayout.Children.Add(listStackLayout);

As you see, I added a new StackLayout with the only purpose of putting the ListView inside it. Then I put that listStackLayout inside the main _stackLayout.

See the post on this Xamarin forum post for more information