Question

I’ve got a very simple app.xaml.cs that, when the app starts up, creates a new PrimeWindow, and makes it accessible to the outside.

public partial class App : Application
{
    public static PrimeWindow AppPrimeWindow { get; set; }

    private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
    {
        AppPrimeWindow = new PrimeWindow();
        AppPrimeWindow.Show();    
    }
}

The xaml for PrimeWindow looks like this:

<Window x:Class="WpfApplication1.PrimeWindow"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Title="Window1" Height="500" Width="500"
    xmlns:MyControls="clr-namespace:WpfApplication1">
    <DockPanel Name="dockPanel1" VerticalAlignment="Top">
        <MyControls:ContentArea x:Name="MyContentArea" />
    </DockPanel>
</Window>

Being a complete WPF novice, I’m doubtless messing several things up, but the question of the moment is this: how do I reference the content area in code elsewhere? I can easily get ahold of the DockPanel, via something like

DockPanel x = App.AppPrimeWindow.dockPanel1;

But digging any deeper doesn’t seem easy to do. I can get a UIElementCollection of the DockPanel’s children, and I can get individual children by an integer index, but, from a maintainability standpoint, that’s clearly not the way to do this.

Answer 1

If you need to reference the children, passing the UIElementCollection around would do it. If you just wanted to access MyContentArea, there’s nothing stopping you from doing the following:

MyControls.ContentArea = App.AppPrimeWindow.myContentArea;

If you need to dynamically see if theres a ContentArea within your DockPanel, the following would work:

DockPanel dock = App.AppPrimeWindow.dockPanel1;

for (int i = 0; i < dock.Children.Count; i++)
{
  if (dock.Children[i] is ContentArea) // Checking the type
  {
    ContentArea ca = (ContentArea)dock.Children[i];
    // logic here
    // return;/break; if you're only processing a single ContentArea
  }
}