Question

I have developed a Silverlight control which shows a list of documents. This takes as much or as little space as the integrating developer likes.

However, when the users adds documents I use a ChildWindow to get a bunch of metadata before the document is actually uploaded. This dialog can be fairly large.

We’ve found a way to go full-screen but we think this would surprise users (and not in the sense of surprise and delight!). Is there a better way to allow this dialog to use more screen space than the parent silverlight container?

Answer 1

Interesting question. For a moment, I thought that you could circumvent the issue by opening a true or fake HTML popup by calling into host page’s JavaScript. This popup would then be another Silverlight instance which could then be as big as necessary.

However, this solution has several challenges:

1. List item
2. You need to fake the ‘modalness’ of the original SL instance and/or the host page
3. You need to fiddle with JavaScript, though this is largely alleviated by using jQuery
4. The target SL instance should be carefully sized so that the ChildWindow covers the entire surface in order to hide the fact that there is another instance here
5. You’ll need to establish a way to communicate the data acquired in the ChildWindow back into the original SL instance; you can either do this by storing it in the host’s DOM or using SL’s built in local messaging

While neither of the challenges are deal-breaking, it might be a bit too much work, out of your comfort zone, or impossible due to the other external limitations imposed.

But it is a neat little workaround, isn’t it?