Question

I am still very new and trying my first serious data binding. I have read a lot about how it works, am just struggling with this concrete example. I have tried to read all links I could find on this, but most sources tend to be a bit imprecise at key spots. So here goes:

-My Application generates dynamically a variable ‘PlayerList’ of type ‘List’, where ‘Player’ is a complex object.

-I want to display this in a ListBox via Binding. Obvoiusly, since Player is a complex Object I want to create a DataTemplate for it. So I have something like this in the ‘Window1.xaml’:

<ListBox 
    Name="ListBox_Players" 
    ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource PlayerListResource}}"
    ItemTemplate="{StaticResource PlayerTemplate}">
</ListBox>  

and something like this in the ‘App.xaml’:

<DataTemplate x:Key="PlayerTemplate">  <!-- DataType="{x:Type Player}" --> 
    <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
      <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=name}"/>
      <TextBlock Text=", "/>
      <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=nrOfTabls}"/>
    </StackPanel>
</DataTemplate>

Of course, this template will become more verbose later. So as you see above, I have tried to create a resource for the PlayerList variable, but have not managed yet, i.e., smthn. like this

<src: XXX x:Key="PlayerListResource"/>

where for XXX as I understand it I should enter the class of the Resource variable. I tried

List<Player>, List<src:Player>

etc., but obv. XAML has trouble with the ‘<,>’ characters.

I also have another problem: By not declaring a resource but by direct binding (i.e., in C# writing “ListBox_Players.ItemsSource=PlayerList;”) and deleting the ‘ItemTemplate’ declaration and overwriting the ToString() method of the Player class to output the name of the Player I have managed to see that the binding works (i.e., I get a list of Player names in the ListBox). But then, if I insert the template again, it displays only ‘,’my Template does not work!

Answer 1

The fact that you’re getting just commas without anything else suggests to me that either the names of Player members do not match the names in Path= in the DataTemplate (I had this problem at one point), or the relevant Player members are inaccessible.

I just tested what you’ve shown of your code so far, and it seemed to work fine. The only change I made was change this line:

ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource PlayerListResource}}"

to this line:

ItemsSource = "{Binding}"

This tells the program that it’ll get the ItemsSource at run time.

My Player class was:

class Player {
    public string name { get; set; }
    public int nrOfTabls { get; set; }
}

and my MainWindow.xaml.cs was:

public partial class MainWindow : Window {
    private ObservableCollection<Player> players_;

    public MainWindow() {
        InitializeComponent();

        players_ =new ObservableCollection<Player> () {
            new Player() {
                name = "Alex",
                nrOfTabls = 1,
            },
            new Player() {
                name = "Brett",
                nrOfTabls = 2,
            },
            new Player() {
                name="Cindy",
                nrOfTabls = 231,
            }
        };

        ListBox_Players.ItemsSource = players_;
    }
}