Question

I am recreating a small app in WPF and I am trying to use MVVM where it makes sense. I started out thinking I would use it 100% of the time, and so far I have, but I’ve come to the conclusion that strict MVVM (no code-behind whatsoever) is not necessarily a positive thing.

Now I am trying to make a user control that will bind to a list and create a regular button for every item in the list. (Essentially I’m recreating a list-box but with a different style.) I am making this user control specifically to avoid creating the buttons on the fly in the main window’s code-behind, but I am thinking that since everything is essentially “view”, and all logic will be done elsewhere, I can just add the buttons in the code behind without technically breaking MVVM. Is this line of thinking correct, deeply flawed or somewhere in between? Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

strict MVVM (no code-behind whatsoever)

MVVM doesn’t forbid the use of code-behind… sometimes code-behind is the right place to do something, as long as it’s purely UI-related.

However in that case I don’t see the benefit of creating those buttons in code-behind, when you can easily make an ItemsControl with an ItemTemplate that will display buttons for each item in your collection.

<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding YourCollection}">
    <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
            <Button Content="{Binding Text}" Command="{Binding DoSomethingCommand}" />
        </DataTemplate>
    </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
</ItemsControl>