Question

Im building a small digital signage system to run on internal machines. I would like to provide the editors (non tech people) with some template to choose the layout from. Something in the line of:

Conceptual drawing of template http://www.vikingworks.dk/template.png

It should be easy for me to maintain the templates and to create a new template i.e. just create the XAMl markup.

Any ideas on how to make this work? what do i do runtime? how do i create the templates?

Any pointers that would lead me in the right direction is appreciated

Answer 1

Not sure I follow entirely, but presumably there are a fixed number of fields that can be displayed. Thus, you could expose these fields via your view model:

public class YourViewModel : ViewModel
{
    public string Text
    {
        //get and set omitted
    }

    public ImageSource Image1
    {
        //get and set omitted
    }

    public ImageSource Image2
    {
        //get and set omitted
    }
}

Each template you have could be stored under a different key:

<DataTemplate x:Key="FirstTemplate" DataType="{x:Type local:YourViewModel}">
    ...
</DataTemplate>

<DataTemplate x:Key="SecondTemplate" DataType="{x:Type local:YourViewModel}">
    ...
</DataTemplate>

Then within each template can just bind to the fields in your view model:

<TextBlock Content="{Binding Text}"/>
<Image Grid.Row="1" Source="{Binding Image1}"/>
<Image Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Source="{Binding Image2}"/>

To switch between templates, you can just substitute the resource at the appropriate level of your resource hierarchy:

this.Resources.Clear();
this.Resources.Add(FindResource(templateKey));