Question

I need to create a Dialog / Prompt including TextBox for user input. My problem is, how to get the text after having confirmed the dialog? Usually I would make a class for this which would save the text in a property. However I want do design the Dialog using XAML. So I would somehow have to extent the XAML Code to save the content of the TextBox in a property – but I guess that’s not possible with pure XAML. What would be the best way to realize what I’d like to do? How to build a dialog which can be defined from XAML but can still somehow return the input? Thanks for any hint!

Answer 1

The “responsible” answer would be for me to suggest building a ViewModel for the dialog and use two-way databinding on the TextBox so that the ViewModel had some “ResponseText” property or what not. This is easy enough to do but probably overkill.

The pragmatic answer would be to just give your text box an x:Name so that it becomes a member and expose the text as a property in your code behind class like so:

<!-- Incredibly simplified XAML -->
<Window x:Class="MyDialog">
   <StackPanel>
       <TextBlock Text="Enter some text" />
       <TextBox x:Name="ResponseTextBox" />
       <Button Content="OK" Click="OKButton_Click" />
   </StackPanel>
</Window>

Then in your code behind…

partial class MyDialog : Window {

    public MyDialog() {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    public string ResponseText {
        get { return ResponseTextBox.Text; }
        set { ResponseTextBox.Text = value; }
    }

    private void OKButton_Click(object sender, System.Windows.RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        DialogResult = true;
    }
}

Then to use it…

var dialog = new MyDialog();
if (dialog.ShowDialog() == true) {
    MessageBox.Show("You said: " + dialog.ResponseText);
}