Question

After weeks of using Prism I have been through every kind of navigation methods. But there is still one thing that I haven’t been able to achieve with Prism “out-of-the-box”: navigate to a view-model instance. It is really easy to navigate to a view-model or view type but there is actually no way to navigate to a real view-model instance.

For example when I have a list of different view-model instances (different type too), if one is selected and I want to display it in my content region, I cannot achieve it unless I publish the change through event aggregation and I do not want that because this gets me stuck to one kind of view in my content region. What I want to do is to register a view-model instance into a region, so the view can load dynamically from data templates.

Actually I achieved to do this by creating a RegisterViewModelWithRegion as an extension method to RegionManager, it works well but it is not really neat as I have to manually lookup through my application resources, load the view, attach my view-model instance and then add the view to my region.

I really feel that I am missing something into the architecture because this kind of practice seem obvious to me but apparently I cannot find anybody having the same concern.

Your help and experience would much appreciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

After some discussions with the Prism team, I found out that actually, using the Region.Add(object view) method to inject a view-model in a region is totally ok. It will give exactly the same result (except for some minor case).

I inspected the ItemsControlRegionAdapter and all it does in the end is

regionTarget.ItemsSource = region.Views;

regionTarget being the target control (ListBox for example) and region.Views property being the objects you inject into your regions.

Of course, thanks for your help Rachel 🙂