Question

I am building a both Silverlight and WPF clients for our project.

When I try to assign context menus for controls, it seems to me that a context menu can be assigned only to one control at a time, is that true?

E.g. when I am drawing several lines

ContextMenu contextMenu = CreateLineMenu();

for (int i = 0; i < Points.Count - 1; i++)
        {
            Line l = new Line();
            ...
            canvas.Children.Add(l);
            ContextMenuService.SetContextMenu(l, contextMenu);
            }
        }

The menu works only for the line added as last.

Answer 1

A single context menu can only be assigned to one parent object at a time as it is just added into the visual tree under that child (and no visual element can have multiple parents in SL/WPF).

If you look at how context menus are defined in XAML this will become clearer.

To share one instance of a context menu you would need to dynamically assign it (e.g. when the mouse right button is clicked, or some other event).

This does seem a very inefficient way to define context menus, so I am sure others have created generic ways to share them… keep on searching (I will).