Question

This may be an obvious question, but I think there may well be multiple ways to implement it, so not only will this be useful to me, hopefully it will be useful to others.

Essentially I’m looking for the best way to implement a list view that can accept different types of objects and then renders them with the appropriate item/data template for that object.

So for example… we have a standard product list view, and when we view different categories the business has decided it would like to show a different item template style for each different category.

The main reason for asking this here, is to avoid a nasty hacky solution and discover a good clean method instead.

Hopefully I’ve provided enough information, let me know if you need more.

Answer 1

Just specifying DataTemplates in the Resources with the respective DataType is enough, e.g.

<ListView ItemsSource="{Binding Data}">
    <ListView.Resources>
        <!-- Do NOT set the x:Key -->
        <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type local:Employee}">
            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" Foreground="Blue"/>
        </DataTemplate>
        <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type local:Machine}">
            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Model}" Foreground="Red"/>
        </DataTemplate>
    </ListView.Resources>
</ListView>

(Note that DataTemplate.DataType can also be used for implicit XML data templating (see docs), the property type for that reason is not System.Type, so unlike in Style.TargetType you have to use x:Type to reference a CLR-type. If you just enter a string it will not be converted to a type.)

You might also want to look into CompositeCollections, to get clean merged lists of varying types.

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Sample data i used:

ObservableCollection<Employee> data = new ObservableCollection<Employee>(new Employee[]
{
    new Employee("Hans", "Programmer")      ,
    new Employee("Elister", "Programmer")   ,
    new Employee("Steve", "GUI Designer")   ,
    new Employee("Stephen", "GUI Designer") ,
    new Employee("Joe", "Coffee Getter")    ,
    new Employee("Julien", "Programmer")    ,
    new Employee("John", "Coffee Getter")   ,
});
ObservableCollection<Machine> data2 = new ObservableCollection<Machine>(new Machine[]
{
    new Machine("XI2",    String.Empty),
    new Machine("MK2-xx", String.Empty),
    new Machine("A2-B16", String.Empty),
});
CompositeCollection cc1 = new CompositeCollection();
cc1.Add(new CollectionContainer() { Collection = data });
cc1.Add(new CollectionContainer() { Collection = data2 });
Data = cc1;