Question

I am trying to implement a ListView with a GridView with sortable columns.
To sort the ListView I hook up the Click event for the GridViewColumnHeaders and adding SortDescriptors to the default view source (similar to what is done in MSDN).

Something like this:

<ListView ItemsSource="MY ITEMS SOURCE BINDING">
    <ListView.View>
        <GridView>
            <GridView.Columns>
                <GridViewColumn DisplayMemberBinding="MY DISPLAYMEMBER  BINDING">
                    <GridViewColumnHeader Content="My Header" Click="ColumnHeaderClicked"/>

This all works fine, but I would like to generalize it a bit. To do that I simply derived GridViewColumnHeader and wrote a click-handler. I know there are many sortable list view implementations out there typically deriving from ListView, but I was just wondering if this approach is possible.

Something like this:

<ListView ItemsSource="MY ITEMS SOURCE BINDING">
    <ListView.View>
        <GridView>
            <GridView.Columns>
                <GridViewColumn DisplayMemberBinding="MY DISPLAYMEMBER  BINDING">
                    <local:SortableGridViewColumnHeader Content="My Header"/>

For this to work I need to navigate from the SortableGridViewColumnHeader code to the containing ListView in order to set new SortDescriptors.

I tried navigating up the Parent ladder, but the GridViewColumnHeader is not a visual child of my ListView. Surely I could make a dependency property and bind it to the ListView, but there must be a way to navigate to it instead.

How would I do that in code? (I am not looking for answers on how to sort a WPF ListViews in general, I am wondering if it can be done this way).

EDIT

It turned out that what I needed was this parent searcher in the click-handler of my GridViewColumnHeader derivative.

DependencyObject parent = this;
do
{
    parent = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(parent);
    if (parent == null) return;
} while (!(parent is ListView));

Now my sorting works like a charm.

Answer 1

There is a much easier way to do that, using an attached property. Check out this article for details.

<ListView ItemsSource="{Binding Persons}"
      IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True"
      util:GridViewSort.AutoSort="True">
    <ListView.View>
        <GridView>
            <GridView.Columns>
                <GridViewColumn Header="Name"
                                DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Name}"
                                util:GridViewSort.PropertyName="Name"/>
                <GridViewColumn Header="First name"
                                DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding FirstName}"
                                util:GridViewSort.PropertyName="FirstName"/>
                <GridViewColumn Header="Date of birth"
                                DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding DateOfBirth}"
                                util:GridViewSort.PropertyName="DateOfBirth"/>
            </GridView.Columns>
        </GridView>
    </ListView.View>
</ListView>