Question

I have a WPF view with a TextBox, binding the Text field to a ViewModel with UpdateSourceTrigger set to PropertyChanged. In the property setter in the ViewModel, I have a simple check to prevent the text from exceeding 10 characters:

<TextBox Text="{Binding Name, UpdateSourceTrigger=PropertyChanged, Mode=TwoWay}" />

public partial class MainWindow : Window
{
    public MainWindow()
    {
        InitializeComponent();

        this.DataContext = new MainViewModel();
    }
}


public string Name
{
    get { return _Name; }
    set
    {
        if (_Name != value)
        {
            if (value.Length <= 10)
            {
                _Name = value;
            }
            RaisePropertyChanged("Name");
        }
    }
}

If the value isn’t set, I still RaisePropertyChanged (which simply fires PropertyChanged).

The problem is that when I type in the 11th character in the UI, I don’t update _Name. I fire PropertyChanged, and I can see the get accessor get called and it returns the string with only 10 characters. However, my TextBox doesn’t reflect this; it still shows the string with 11 characters.

On top of that, is that if on the 11th character I change the text in the setter to “ERROR”, and fire property changed, the TextBox DOES update to show the altered text.

So why is it that if I alter the text in the setter back to the previous value, the UI doesn’t reflect this?

I know there are alternative ways of handling max characters, but why won’t this work?

Answer 1

This is nothing but a bug in the framework. The Text property in the TextBox does get your new value but the GUI is now out of sync with its own TextProperty. This also happends for any ItemsControl when you want to cancel a change of SelectedItem from the ViewModel and it’s really annoying.

This bug doesn’t happend when you use explicit Binding though so this can be used as a workaround.

Xaml

<TextBox Text="{Binding Path=MyName,
                        UpdateSourceTrigger=Explicit}"
         TextChanged="TextBox_TextChanged"/>

Code behind

private void TextBox_TextChanged(object sender, TextChangedEventArgs e)
{
    TextBox textBox = sender as TextBox;
    textBox.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty).UpdateSource();
}

To verify that the TextBox GUI indeed is out of sync, just observe the value of TextBox.Text. The TextBox will say “123456789___0” for example while TextBlock says “123456789”.

<StackPanel>
    <TextBox Name="myTextBox"
             Text="{Binding Path=MyName,
                            UpdateSourceTrigger=PropertyChanged}"/>
    <TextBlock Text="{Binding ElementName=myTextBox, Path=Text}"/>
</StackPanel>