Question

I am writing what is turning out to be a simple GUI in WPF. At the moment I have a static list inside of a ComboBox, like this:

    <ComboBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="22" Margin="24,97,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="83"
        SelectedItem="{Binding fruit, Mode=TwoWay}">
        <ComboBoxItem>apple</ComboBoxItem>
        <ComboBoxItem>orange</ComboBoxItem>
        <ComboBoxItem>grape</ComboBoxItem>
        <ComboBoxItem>banana</ComboBoxItem>
    </ComboBox>

I’m binding the SelectedItem to a singleton in my code that has already been initialized and used elsewhere.

I put a breakpoint on the get of fruit and it returns “grape”, but the selected item is always blank. I even added a button so that I could call RaisePropertyChanged manually, but the RaisePropertyChange call didn’t do anything either.

Finally, MVVMLight gives blendability. For no important reason I changed the binding in the combobox from SelectedItem to Text As soon as I did that, my design time form filled in with the expected values, but, when the code is running, the box continues to sit at the empty state

Answer 1

This is because you have items of type ComboBoxItem in the ComboBox but the property you are trying to bind to is of type string.

You have three options:

1.Instead of adding ComboBoxItem items add String items:

<ComboBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="22" Margin="24,97,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="83"
    SelectedItem="{Binding fruit, Mode=TwoWay}">
    <sys:String>apple</sys:String>
    <sys:String>orange</sys:String>
    <sys:String>grape</sys:String>
    <sys:String>banana</sys:String>
</ComboBox>

2.Instead of SelectedItem bind to SelectedValue and specify SelectedValuePath as Content:

<ComboBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="22" Margin="24,97,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="83"
    SelectedValue="{Binding fruit, Mode=TwoWay}"
    SelectedValuePath="Content">
    <ComboBoxItem>apple</ComboBoxItem>
    <ComboBoxItem>orange</ComboBoxItem>
    <ComboBoxItem>grape</ComboBoxItem>
    <ComboBoxItem>banana</ComboBoxItem>
</ComboBox>

3.Do not specify items directly in XAML, but use ItemsSource property to bind to a collection of strings:

<ComboBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="22" Margin="24,97,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="83"
    ItemsSource="{Binding Fruits}"
    SelectedItem="{Binding fruit, Mode=TwoWay}"/>