Question

If I have a simple object:

class MyObject
{
    public string MyValueProperty { get; set; }
}

and if I want to instantiate it in XAML and set the property (as below), this works:

<local:MyObject MyValueProperty="SomeValue" />

However, if my object has a collection property on it:

class MyObject
{
   public MyObject() { this.MyCollectionProperty = new List<string>(); }

   public IList<string> MyCollectionProperty { get; set; }
}

then I cannot work out how to add items to it through XAML. What I would like to be able to do is something like:

<local:MyObject>
    <local:MyObject.MyCollectionProperty>
         <sys:String>One</sys:String>
         <sys:String>Two</sys:String>
         <sys:String>etc</sys:String>
    </local:MyObject.MyCollectionProperty>
</local:MyObject>

I have tried this but I get a parse exception stating that I can’t set String to a property of type IList<string>, and I realise I could probably work around this by adding an instantiation of a `List’ to the markup, but I want to avoid this.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Worked it out – the problem was because my property was defined as an IList<T> and so the XAML parser couldn’t work out how to instantiate an appropriate instance (even though it already had an instance specified.

Changing the property declaration to List<string> get it working:

class MyObject
{
   public MyObject() { this.MyCollectionProperty = new List<string>(); }

   public List<string> MyCollectionProperty { get; set; }
}