Question

This is my first day with WPF. Fun!

I currently have a WPF application that opens/returns a file with OpenFileDialog. I have an existing script that deconstructs and extracts that data already. What I need is to be able to access that data (I guess bind it to) and display it in an element in XAML. I haven’t been able to figure out how to do this.

So this is my setup.

MainWindow.xaml.cs:

namespace GridView
{
    public partial class MainWindow
    {
        private GridSet<byte> _grids;

        public MainWindow()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Open_OnClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            var openDialog = new OpenFileDialog();
            if (openDialog.ShowDialog().Value)
            {
                //Populate _grids with data
            }
        }
    }
}

MainWindow.xaml:

<Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
        mc:Ignorable="d" x:Class="GridView.MainWindow"
        Title="Grid View" Width="800" Height="600" WindowStartupLocation="CenterScreen">

    <DockPanel>

...
    "Open_OnClick" here
...

    <TextBox/>

    </DockPanel>
</Window>

As you can see, the .cs file is simply the interaction logic for the MainWindow. So why on earth can’t I figure out how to configure my TextBox to display data in _grids?

I have fiddled with x:Name, x:Reference, Window.Resources, DataContext, Binding, and so on, but I haven’t found a guide yet that has applied to this. And it’s probably because I still don’t understand every facet of WPF. But what am I doing wrong here?

(I would alternatively be satisfied with a WPF tutorial that doesn’t make my brain ooze out my ears.)

Answer 1

You have declared _grids in your C#, but it’s not added to the visual tree.

The simplest way to do this is to declare the object in the XAML (though I’m not 100% sure what a GridSet is – I can’t find any documentation on that). So if it was a simple Grid you’d have:

<DockPanel>
    <Grid x:Name="MyGrid" />
</DockPanel>

By naming it you can access it in the code:

MyGrid.Children.Add(something);

To use binding you must set the DataContext of the window. The simplest way is to have:

this.DataContext = this;

in you constructor.