Question

I’m new to WPF and before I dive in solving a problem in completely the wrong way I was wondering if WPF is clever enough to handle something for me.

Imagine I have a collection containing objects. Each object is of the same known type and has two parameters. Name (a string) and Picked (a boolean).

The collection will be populated at run time.

I would like to build up a UI element at run time that will represent this collection as a series of checkboxes. I want the Picked parameter of any given object in the collection updated if the user changes the selected state of the checkbox.

To me, the answer is simple. I iterate accross the collection and create a new checkbox for each object, dynamically wiring up a ValueChanged event to capture when Picked should be changed.

It has occured to me, however, that I may be able to harness some unknown feature of WPF to do this better (or “properly”). For example, could data binding be employed here?

I would be very interested in anyone’s thoughts.

Thanks,

E

FootNote: The structure of the collection can be changed completely to better fit any chosen solution but ultimately I will always start from, and end with, some list of string and boolean pairs.

Answer 1

I would strongly recommend the ItemsControl, its behaviour is as close as you can get to the ASP.Net repeater control so it is very flexible.

Declare the item control as:

        <ItemsControl Name="YourItemsControl" 
                      ItemsSource="{Binding Path=YourCollection}" 
                      ItemTemplate="{StaticResource YourTemplate}">
        </ItemsControl>   

Then you can use the datatemplate to organise the data into a display format for the user

    <DataTemplate x:Key="ProjectsTemplate">

        <StackPanel Margin="0,0,0,10">
            <Border CornerRadius="2,2,0,0" Background="{StaticResource ItemGradient}" d:LayoutOverrides="Width, Height">
                <local:ItemContentsUserControl Height="30"/>
            </Border>
     ...

Useful ItemsControl Links

• http://drwpf.com/blog/itemscontrol-a-to-z/
• http://www.galasoft.ch/mydotnet/articles/article-2007041201.aspx

I hope this helps you.