Question

I have my class:

public class CustomCell
{
    public string BindingData
    {
        get { return (string)GetValue(BindingDataProperty); }
        set { SetValue(BindingDataProperty, value); }
    }

    public static readonly DependencyProperty BindingDataProperty =
        DependencyProperty.Register("BindingData", typeof(string), typeof(CustomCell));
}

I set a binding with BindingDataProperty

CustomCell cell = new CustomCell();
cell.SetBinding(CustomCell.BindingDataProperty, new Binding("source"));

And now I want to get the XAML equivalent string using XamlWriter:

string xaml = XamlWriter.Save(cell);

But in the xaml string BindingData is {x:Null} and no any binding is done.

Why? How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

It is a Serialization Limitation of XamlWriter.Save

See the MSDN documentation:

Common references to objects made by various markup extension formats,
such as StaticResource or Binding, will be dereferenced by the
serialization process. These were already dereferenced at the time
that in-memory objects were created by the application runtime, and
the Save logic does not revisit the original XAML to restore such
references to the serialized output. This potentially freezes any
databound or resource obtained value to be the value last used by the
run-time representation, with only limited or indirect ability to
distinguish such a value from any other value set locally. Images are
also serialized as object references to images as they exist in the
project, rather than as original source references, losing whatever
filename or URI was originally referenced. Even resources declared
within the same page are seen serialized into the point where they
were referenced, rather than being preserved as a key of a resource
collection.