Question

I’m working on an app, that displayes huge (10000+ elements) graphs in a wpf canvas.
I’d like a feature like in Visual Studio, when you can split the view of an editor (so I can view two distant part of the same graph at the same time).

I have some constraints:

• data binding (creating the bindings) of graph elements makes the loading of big graphs very slow, so I’m not using MVVM, the “VM” knows about the view and updates it directly when needed
• the children of the canvas are frameworkelements, since I use the Tag property
• because of the number of graph elements, I don’t want to keep two different view for each element for the two part of the split view

So it should be like displaying multiple parts of the same canvas in different places. You can’t set two parents for the FrameworkElements in WPF, so the easiest way is out of question 🙁

What are my options? Should I reconsider my constraints or there is some workaround for this?

Let me know if you need any more details (it’s a big application, so I can’t give you every information).

Edit: duplicating with visual brush is not an option since I need proper input event notifications, so both view must be editable.

Answer 1

Options:

• Bind the same data to two controls.
• Use a visual brush and duplicate input on the real control.
• Create a custom graphing control that can output two parts of the graph at once.

If binding to two controls is too slow, then I think you need to rethink your application. The very fact that you have so much data displayed at once that you need a dual view to see separate parts is disturbing. That should raise a red flag. The red flag would notify you that, “What I need, and what I have is different.” And you should go back to the drawing board and find out what you really need.

Otherwise, it might be best to create a custom control. The graph is rendering in its entirety even though you only need small portions displayed. If you had your own custom control you could speed up the entire app by rendering only visible portions at a time, and splitting within the control.