Question

Does anybody have a good way of finding ALL the controls within an object that is of the same type? Here’s my scenario, I have a tab control and within each tab control exists a user control (ALL of which match the same base type e.g. MyBaseClassControl). I want to be able to find that user control WITHOUT having to use the control.FindName(“controlName”) method, rather I would like to get a handle on the control by type (e.g. base class). The VisualTreeHelper class seems to do nothing for me as it only returns native Silverlight objects.

Answer 1

Given this:

public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> AllChildren(this DependencyObject root)
{
    var children = root.DirectChildren().ToList();
    return children.Union(children.SelectMany(o => o.AllChildren()));
}

public static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> DirectChildren(this DependencyObject parent)
{
    var childCount = VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(parent);
    for (var i = 0; i < childCount; i++)
        yield return System.Windows.Media.VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(parent, i);
}

You could do this:

myObj.AllChildren().OfType<MyBaseClassControl>();