Question

I’m trying to figure out what would be best solution to the problem I’m facing. I have a Silverlight application which should be composed from different modules. I can use Prism, place regions and load modules and fill regions with loaded modules but this is not enough in my situation. Here’s what I want to accomplish:

• For most views that gets loaded from different xap files, I should place an element somewhere in the shell, which will perform navigation to the dynamically loaded view.
• That element (which links to dynamically loaded view) should support localization and should have dynamically assignable data templates, different module links should have different content/data template (I’m thinking writing data templates in xaml files on the server and reading them from silverlight via XamlReader, maybe there’s a better way?).
• Uri mapping and browser journal should work with navigation. Silverlight default navigation mechanism better suits my needs than the one found in Prism.
• The architecture should support MVVM.

I think thats all. I just couldn’t think of a good architecture which will satisfy all my needs. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I do not know of a single product/solution that would cover all your requirements, so here are some comments on each:

1. If one area of the shell has a region that supports multiple items, you just register a control of type link/button etc with the same region name in each module. For example we register views based on the Telerik TadRibbonTab (instead of UserControl) with a region named “views” which is a RibbonBarTab with a region named “views”. Every module then adds its its own button to the list. You can do the same thing with any multi-item container.
2. Localisation is a completely different issue and can be solved in a number of ways. See my answer here: Load Resources ".resx" from folder in Silverlight
3. A custom navigation mapper can be made to behave like the standard one, without messing up the support for Prism regions. The one we created encodes GUI information such as current selections (current view and item selections etc) into the URL. That means we are in total control of the state and the URL controls the state.
4. Hardly anything stops you using MVVM as that is one small feature for separating views from code-behind data.

I will be interested in what other solutions are proposed as we are always looking for new ideas too.