Question

I have a silverlight navigation application where I load and initialize a lot of things in the MainPage.aspx loading.

All the Pages (views) are dependent on the loading of that data.

But really often my users add an internet shortcut on their desktop for my application. but the link often points to a specific page like that :

http://myServer/MyApp/default.aspx#/TheView

I want to force the users to go to the “Default” view (and ignore the #/view parameter) when the application Starts up.

Whats the best way I can do that?

Answer 1

I don’t think it’s a good idea to ‘avoid’ links. You should construct the application in a way when it’s not a problem.

For example you can send a message from your main logic when everything loaded, and until that message you can disable the appropriate UI (while waiting for data). Messenger (or EventAggregator in Prism) is a publisher-subscriber pattern to achive communication between components without reference to each other. If you don’t know it yet, take a look at MVVMLight Messenger or Prism EventAggregator

But if the first option is not okay for you, you can play with the Frame control’s JournalOwnership property:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.frame.journalownership(v=vs.95).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.navigation.journalownership(v=vs.95).aspx

OwnsJournal is your value, because it does not integrate with the browser journal and the url stays the original so your users can’t bookmark a ‘sub page’.

You can also implement your own journal mechanism.

Another :), but pretty ugly option would be if you track the first page load (in OnNavigatedTo Page events for example), and at the very first request you manually navigate to the main page. Or in the App.xaml.cs, when application starts up you forward the page request.

But I recommend the first one.