Question

I need to display a memory dump for a technical application. Each Byte (Cell) should be defined via a DataTemplate to show additional information (highlight via setting Background color, individual Tooltip etc). I made the following attempt:

  <DataTemplate x:Key="HexNumberTemplate">
    <Grid>
      [...]
      <TextBlock>
        <TextBlock.Text>
          <Binding Path="Cell[0].Value">
            <Binding.Converter>
              [...]
            </Binding.Converter>
          </Binding>
        </TextBlock.Text>
      </TextBlock>
    </Grid>
  </DataTemplate>

The final result should look like this:

My problem is the fix coded Binding path. ‘Cell’ is a list of objects that holds all necessary information to display the cell. Using this approach, I need to define 16 times the same DataTemplate with Cell[0] to Cell[15]. I definitely want to avoid this!
I read an approach defining the DataTemplate in source code where I assemble the XAML in a string and call Markup.XamlReader.Load(MemoryStreamOfTheString). But here I lose the comfort of the Visual Studio IDE.
Is it possible to define the DataTemplate in XAML and make the indexer of the Cell-Object a parameter?

Answer 1

You should do like you have read: create templates dynamically, by loading them with XamlReader. In order to have comfort of XAML editor, you can define your template in a separate xaml file like this:

<DataTemplate
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" 
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
    <Grid DataContext="{Binding Current_Cell}">
        <!--Your template controls goes here.-->
    </Grid>
</DataTemplate>

Then set type of this file to Resource, and load it into string and simply replace Current_Cell with each individual cell numbers before you load template from string when you construct your view.
By setting DataContext of Grid you help yourself to use other binding inside the template (context is already set to the current cell, and you don’t need to replace it everywhere).

I was in a the same situation recently, only difference was, that my grid had totally dynamic columns (loaded from server), so I didn’t even have the opportunity to create 16 templates 🙂