Question

I’m trying to bind to some XML data from my WPF application. I’ve set up the data context so that the XmlElement I’m trying to bind to ends up looking like this:

<Item name="Potion" classes="Healing Item" value="200">
    <Classes>
      <Class value="HealingItem" />
    </Classes>
    <Description value="A low quality potion, it restores a small amount of health" />
    <Components>
      <HealingComponent>
        <BattleHealingComponent>
          <HPHealingComponent value="500" type="Absolute"/>
        </BattleHealingComponent>
      </HealingComponent>
    </Components>
  </Item>

Now here’s the problem. I can’t figure out an XPath query I can bind with that will return only the Component Subnodes.

I know it’ll go something like this:

 ItemsSource="{Binding XPath=Components/*/????}"

I’m stuck on what to use for ????

The result of this query should display “HealingComponent” I’ve tried playing around with various different parameters on an online XPath visualizer, but I can’t figure this one out. I ready about name(), but I can’t seem to get that to work.

Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

In addition to the ItemsSource you probably need an ItemTemplate, this should work:

<ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding XPath=Components/*}">
    <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/>
        </DataTemplate>
    </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
</ListBox>

If you do not intend to do anything fancy you can also use the DisplayMemberPath, though in this case the binding ensures that Name is not interpreted as an XPath, you may not have that kind of control with DisplayMemberPath.