First of all, I do not feel completely educated on how to navigate between multiple “pages” of a window.
For example, I have a Window called MainWindow. Inside of this, I have a header and a footer. In the middle is a panel which contains content.
This panel will originally contain content A. Upon clicking something in A, I want to remove A from view and show a new panel with content B. However, I want B to be shown in the same window (i.e., not hide the window and open a new one). Is hiding/showing these panels the correct way to go about it?
If using the panel switching mechanism is the correct way, then I am worried about resource management. If I set panel A to not be visible, and panel B to be visible, will I still have resources from both panels loaded? If I have a large number of panels to switch between, I would not want to load content for all of them, but rather the active one.
How would I go about making sure that I am correctly handling resources and memory between these different views?
If I have the completely wrong idea about how to switch views within a single window, please let me know.
Thanks.
One alternative is to just use a single ContentPresenter, and put your individual “panels” in there, but only one at a time.
Instead of flipping visibility, you could use Data Binding to change the bound content within the ContentPresenter. This would only leave a single “view” in place at a time, preventing the neeed for “a large number” of panels to be loaded.