Question

I have a ListView which has it’s table filled out with a ListItemCollection I am creating and managing programmatically.

I want to check which of the controls have received any kind of input, currently I am focused on any kind of TextInput. I do not have any idea how to find exactly which column and row this control is from (by name or id, whichever is easiest).

A solution to this problem in a usual Windows Forms application would be programmatically assigning a unique name to each control. With a template such as [control name]_[row], such as itemName_1.

It doesn’t seem possible to modify the name of a control generated by a ListItemCollection. I also tried binding a control with Path="x", however XAML prevents using the binding tag with the name property.

What is a good solution to this problem, where I can somehow detect which exact control was interacted with, without searching through all of them?

Here is what I have right now (in the picture only one row was created):

Answer 1

The problem here is that you use WPF in a WinForms way. It’s not meant to be used like that, and so you end up doing intricate and bogus things.

Here is what you should do :

Let’s say we are manipulating an order containing order details.

We first create classes to hold our data

public class Order : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
   private readonly ObservableCollection<OrderDetail> m_details = new ...

   public ObservableCollection<OrderDetail> Details { get { return m_details; } }

   public decimal Total {
     get {
       decimal total = 0.0;
       foreach(var detail in m_details) total += detail.SubTotal;
       return total;
     }
   }
}

public class OrderDetail : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
   private readonly Order m_order;

   public OrderDetail(Order order) {
     m_order = order;
   }       

   private string m_name;
   public string Name
   {
     get { return m_name; }
     set {
       if(m_name != value) {
         m_name = value;
         RaisePropertyChanged("Name");
       }
     }
   }
   private int m_amount;
   public int Amount {
     get { return m_amount; }
     set {
       if(m_amount != value) {
         m_amount = value;
         RaisePropertyChanged("Amount");
         RaisePropertyChanged("SubTotal");
         m_order.RaisePropertyChanged("Total");
       }
     }
   }
   private decimal m_unitPrice;
   public decimal UnitPrice {
     get { return m_amount; }
     set {
       if(m_unitPrice!= value) {
         m_unitPrice = value;
         RaisePropertyChanged("UnitPrice");
         RaisePropertyChanged("SubTotal");
         m_order.RaisePropertyChanged("Total");
       }
     }
   }
   public decimal SubTotal { get { return Amount * UnitPrice; } }
}

And then we gonna create a view to visualize and edit our data

...
<ListView ItemsSource="{Binding MyOrder}">
  <ListView.View>
    <GridView>
      <GridViewColumn>
        <GridViewColumn.CellTemplate>
          <DataTemplate>
            <TextBox Text="{Binding Name}"/>
          </DataTemplate>
        </GridViewColumn.CellTemplate>
      </GridViewColumn>
      ...
    </GridView>
  </ListView.View>
</ListView>
<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
  <TextBlock Text="Total: "/>
  <Textblock Text="{Binding MyOrder.Total}"/>
</StackPanel>
...