Question

I have a TreeView showing an object’s properties. One of the properties is a large byte array.

TreeView’s ItemsSource obviously treats this as a collection of child nodes, but what I actually want is ONE child node showing the entire array that can still be expanded/collapsed.

eg currently

- MyObject
    Prop1
    Prop2
  - PropWithBytes
      1
      2
      3
      etc

What I want:

- MyObject
    Prop1
    Prop2
  - PropWithBytes
      1, 2, 3  etc

Is there any way to tell the Tree to treat the collection as a single node?

If I didn’t want the actual data to still be a separate node I could easily write a DataTemplate (as opposed HierarchicalDataTemplate) to to display it in place. I can also use a DataTemplate that uses an Expander instead to hide the data which works fine, but looks ugly.

Answer 1

If I understand your question correctly – try to use ValueConverter which will check if passed value is byte array or not (in case of byte array – returns it’s string representation).

public class ByteArrayValueConverter : IValueConverter
{
    public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        if (value != null && value is IEnumerable<byte>)
            return string.Join(", ", (IEnumerable<byte>)value);
        return value;
    }

    public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture)
    {
        throw new NotSupportedException();
    }
}