Question

I am using MVVM and I would like to communicate between viewmodels. I have a user control that contains another user control inside it, and I would like the parent usercontrol to run some code when a property in the child is changed. I have seen several ways to communicate between viewmodels, such as using MVVM Light Messenger, or PRISM Event Aggregator, but I was hoping there was some way to accomplish this simply by somehow subscribing to the PropertyChanged event raised through the INotifyPropertyChanged implementation.

There is an answer by Matt Hamilton in this post but I have trouble implementing it because it needs a DependencyObject, and my ViewModels are POCOs rather than DOs

Is there some way of using the INotifyPropertyChanged system, as I would prefer to not have to implement a messaging system. If not is a messaging system the best? I also saw an example where some guy just used the code behind of the view to help pass the property, however I don’t want to break the MVVM pattern as I wanna do some testing at a later stage.

Answer 1

There definately multiple ways to handle your scenario. One is certainly to use the INotifyPropertyChanged implementation to propogate your event. The issue is that container would need a direct reference to the child ViewModel to subscribe to the PropertyChanged event.

class ParentVM
{
private const string SomePropertyName = “SomeProperty”;

    public ParentVM()
    {
        ChildVM child = new ChildVM();
        child.PropertyChanged += new System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventHandler(child_PropertyChanged);
    }

    void child_PropertyChanged(object sender, System.ComponentModel.PropertyChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        if (e.PropertyName == SomePropertyName)
        {
            //Do something!!!
        }

    }
}

You could also explicitly define an event and subscribe to it.