Question

I am using MVVm in my WPF application. I am currently playing around with animating a grid so that when a user selected a particular item in a combobox I want my grid to animate as it expand. I have a property in my View Model that I want to bind to trigger the animation in my grid. How do we do this in MVVM? So far I have recently found a solution using

EventTrigger RoutedEvent ="SampleGridEventName"

is there any way to use other triggers to bind to a property in my ViewModel?Something like

Trigger BlahBlah ="{Binding ExpandGrid}"

Answer 1

Yes. Style has DataTrigger which also has EnterActions property. Animations are stored in resources. That’s the trick.

<UserControl x:Class="TriggerSpike.UserControl1"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Height="300" Width="300">
<UserControl.Resources>
    <DoubleAnimation x:Key="SearchAnimation" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" To="1" Duration="0:0:4"/>
    <DoubleAnimation x:Key="StopSearchAnimation" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Opacity" To="0" Duration="0:0:4"/>
</UserControl.Resources>
<StackPanel>
    <TextBlock Name="progressWheel" TextAlignment="Center" Opacity="0">
        <TextBlock.Style>
            <Style>
                <Style.Triggers>
                    <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding IsBusy}" Value="True">
                        <DataTrigger.EnterActions>
                            <BeginStoryboard>
                                <Storyboard>
                                    <StaticResource ResourceKey="SearchAnimation"/>
                                </Storyboard>
                            </BeginStoryboard>
                        </DataTrigger.EnterActions>
                        <DataTrigger.ExitActions>
                            <BeginStoryboard>
                                <Storyboard>
                                   <StaticResource ResourceKey="StopSearchAnimation"/> 
                                </Storyboard>
                            </BeginStoryboard>
                        </DataTrigger.ExitActions>
                    </DataTrigger>
                </Style.Triggers>
            </Style>
        </TextBlock.Style>
        Searching
    </TextBlock>
    <Label Content="Here your search query"/>
    <TextBox Text="{Binding SearchClause}"/>
    <Button Click="Button_Click">Search!</Button>
    <TextBlock Text="{Binding Result}"/>
</StackPanel>
</UserControl>