Getting native device information from BluetoothLE device - xamarin

Question

I'm using the Plugin.BLE nuget package in my Xamarin project to interrogate the BLE devices I have. It seems to be working fine, but there is an object returned as part of the overall device object when the found device event is triggered. The object is called NativeDevice.
Intellisense is showing that this is an object which can be manipulated on the platform which is what I am trying to do so I can store and handle within my mvvm framework.
The problem is that if I cast the object as a Device on the platform and store that in a var, the var is always null.
How am I supposed to get the values from the object on the platform so I can pass these back to my view model?
My code looks like this
(in the forms project)
adapter.DeviceDiscovered += (s, a) =>
{
var adList = new List<AdvertisingRecords>();
foreach (var r in a.Device.AdvertisementRecords)
{
adList.Add(new AdvertisingRecords { Data = r.Data, Type = (AdvertisingRecordType)r.Type });
}
var newbtd = new BluetoothDevice
{
AdvertisementRecords = adList,
NativeDevice = DependencyService.Get<INativeDevice>().ConvertToNative(a.Device.NativeDevice),
Name = a.Device.Name,
Rssi = a.Device.Rssi,
Id = a.Device.Id,
State = (BluetoothStates)a.Device.State
};
btd.Add(newbtd);
};
On the platform
[assembly: Xamarin.Forms.Dependency(typeof(NativeDeviceConverter))]
namespace MyApp.Droid.Injected
{
public class NativeDeviceConverter : INativeDevice
{
public NativeDevice ConvertToNative(object device)
{
var dev = device as Device;
if (dev != null)
return new NativeDevice { Name = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(dev.BluetoothDevice.Name) ? dev.BluetoothDevice.Name : string.Empty, Address = dev.BluetoothDevice.Address, Type = dev.BluetoothDevice.Type.ToString() };
else
return new NativeDevice();
}
}
}
NativeDevice is my abstracted class that I used within the VM

Answer 1

The Reason why device value null is that the type of a.Device.NativeDevice is not of Device type. It is NativeObject so for android it is of type BluetoothDevice and for ios, it is CBPeripheral.
As I understand from your code you want to pass a.Device which is in turn of type Device. So you just need to replace it this line
NativeDevice = DependencyService.Get<INativeDevice>().ConvertToNative(a.Device.NativeDevice)
with
NativeDevice = DependencyService.Get<INativeDevice>().ConvertToNative(a.Device)
Now you can use Device.BluethoothDevice in android.