Context:
I’m developing a WPF application which will contain a lot of different “screens”. Each screen contains a which on its turn contains all the visual elements. Some elements trigger events (e.g., checkboxes), a screen has individual resources, etc.
The main application is “wrapper” around these screens: it contains a menubar, toolbar, statusbar and alike (in a DockPanel) and space to display one screen. Through the menubar, the user can choose which screen he wants to display.
Goal:
I want to dynamically load & display & (event)handle one screen in the space in the main application. I don’t want to copy & paste all the “wrapper” stuff in all the different screens. And As I have many complex screens (around 300 – luckily auto-generated), I don’t want to load all of them at the start of the application, but only upon request.
Question:
What do you recommend as the best way to realize this?
What kind of things should I use and investigate: Pages or windows or User Control for the screens? Does this affect the event handling?
Robbie, you can borrow the workspace concept from Josh Smith’s WPF MVVM article. What you would do is have one hosting window (your wrapper) and load a workspace into this window. You can close the workspace and load a new one as needed, keeping only one open in your main window.
Link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx