Question

I have a WPF ListView control for which I am dynamically creating columns. One of the columns happens to be a CheckBox column. When the user directly clicks on the CheckBox the ListView’s SelectedItem is not changed. Had the checkbox been declared in XAML I would have added handling for the Click event to manually set the selection. However, I’m stumped since it’s a dynamic column.

<ListView
    SelectionMode="Single"
    ItemsSource="{Binding Documents}"                    
    View="{Binding Converter={local:DocumentToGridViewConverter}}" />

The converter takes in an object that has Properties associated with it, there is a name/value pair that can be referenced through indexers.

public class DocumentToGridViewConverter : MarkupExtension, IValueConverter
{
    private static DocumentToGridViewConverter mConverter;

    public object Convert( object value, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture )
    {
        GridView gridView = null;

        Document document = value as Document;
        if( document != null )
        {
            // Create a new grid view.
            gridView = new GridView();

            // Add an isSelected checkbox complete with binding.
            var checkBox = new FrameworkElementFactory( typeof( CheckBox ) );
            gridView.Columns.Add( new GridViewColumn
            {
                Header = string.Empty, // Blank header
                CellTemplate = new DataTemplate { VisualTree = checkBox  },
            } );

            // Add the rest of the columns from the document properties.
            for( int index = 0; index < document.PropertyNames.Length; index++ )
            {
                gridView.Columns.Add( new GridViewColumn
                {
                    Header = document.PropertyNames[index];
                    DisplayMemberBinding = new Binding(
                        string.Format( "PropertyValues[{0}]", index ) )
                } );
            }
        }

        return gridView;
    }

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

    public override object ProvideValue( IServiceProvider serviceProvider )
    {
        if( mConverter == null )
        {
            mConverter = new DocumentToGridViewConverter();
        }
        return mConverter;
    }
}

So, my question is how do I dymaically create a CheckBox that will cause the ListView row to be select when the user clicks on the CheckBox.

Thanks!

EDIT:

This question are similar, but doesn’t have the dynamic piece: WPF ListView SelectedItem is null

Answer 1

One way of solving this is to create a ‘ChildSelectionCompatibleListBoxItem’ which derives from ‘ListBoxItem’ and manually handle selection in the PreviewMouseDown/Up events. Note that its get trickier when you are using SelectionMode.Extended

Another way is to create a derived ListBoxSelectionCompatibleCheckBox which ‘escapes’ mouse events when the parent ListBoxItem is not yet selected.