Question

I have two collections displayed in my WPF application, and I’d like to have elements from one of them disabled in the other. Doing this I’m creating a custom control FilteringListBox that inherits ListBox, and I want to add some handling inside it to disable elements that are set in a collection set through a property on the FilteringListBox. Now, my problem is that the dependency property taking the ObservableCollection that I want to filter elements from isn’t set – even if I bind to it in the xaml.

I’ve created a simplified app where I reproduce the problem. Here is my Xaml:

<StackPanel>
    <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
        <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical">
            <TextBlock>Included</TextBlock>
            <ListBox x:Name="IncludedFooList" ItemsSource="{Binding IncludedFoos}"></ListBox>
        </StackPanel>
        <Button Margin="10" Click="Button_Click">Add selected</Button>
        <StackPanel Orientation="Vertical">
            <TextBlock>Available</TextBlock>
            <Listbox:FilteringListBox x:Name="AvailableFooList" ItemsSource="{Binding AvailableFoos}" FilteringCollection="{Binding IncludedFoos}"></Listbox:FilteringListBox>
        </StackPanel>                
    </StackPanel>            
</StackPanel>

This is my custom component – currently only holding the Dependency Property:

public class FilteringListBox : ListBox
{
    public static readonly DependencyProperty FilteringCollectionProperty =
        DependencyProperty.Register("FilteringCollection", typeof(ObservableCollection<Foo>), typeof(FilteringListBox));                                                 

    public ObservableCollection<Foo> FilteringCollection
    {
        get
        {
            return (ObservableCollection<Foo>)GetValue(FilteringCollectionProperty);
        }
        set
        {
            SetValue(FilteringCollectionProperty, value);
        }
    }
}

And for the complete code the code behind and class definitions are here:

public partial class MainWindow : Window
{
    private MainViewModel _vm;

    public MainWindow()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        _vm = new MainViewModel();
        DataContext = _vm;
    }

    private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        if (AvailableFooList.SelectedItem == null)
            return;
        var selectedFoo = AvailableFooList.SelectedItem as Foo;
        _vm.IncludedFoos.Add(selectedFoo);
    }
}

public class MainViewModel
{
    public MainViewModel()
    {
        IncludedFoos = new ObservableCollection<Foo>();
        AvailableFoos = new ObservableCollection<Foo>();
        GenerateAvailableFoos(); 
    }

    private void GenerateAvailableFoos()
    {
        AvailableFoos.Add(new Foo { Text = "Number1" });
        AvailableFoos.Add(new Foo { Text = "Number2" });
        AvailableFoos.Add(new Foo { Text = "Number3" });
        AvailableFoos.Add(new Foo { Text = "Number4" });
    }

    public ObservableCollection<Foo> IncludedFoos { get; set; }
    public ObservableCollection<Foo> AvailableFoos { get; set; }
}

public class Foo
{
    public string Text { get; set; }
    public override string ToString()
    {
        return Text;
    }
}

I add breakpoints to the setter and getter of the DependencyProperty FilteringCollection in the FilteringListBox, but it is never triggered. Why? How can I fix it?

Answer 1

The binding system bypasses set and get accessors for dependency properties. If you want to execute code when a dependency property changes, you should add a PropertyChangedCallback to the DependencyProperty definition.