I am a beginner in silver light. I created a test application, in which on top there are menus like Home, About Us etc?? and there is a grid control to show content related to menu.
I created controls for Home, About Us etc, and I add this control on a click of associated menu. but I am looking for some generic way, rather than handling click of each menu separately, I also created a common click event, but the problem how can I get the Home COntrol or a About Us Control to add in a grid. In click event method I can get the clicked menu Information. I can write switch statement but it will also not called as a generic.
Something Like find a particular page/Control by its name in a whole silverlight application and add it to my grid.
Thanx!
Take a look at Ria Services and MEF. I'm currently on a Silverlight project and we are relying heavily on Ria Services and MEF. We are using a VMMV approach. It's working out nicely.
Silverlight has the Frame and Page controls to help you with some of these issues.
Check out:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc838245%28v=vs.95%29.aspx
This could be solved by using silverlight navigation, have a look at this blog and here
you can then do something like:
this.MainFrame.Navigate(new Uri("Page2.Xaml",UriKind.Relative));
// where page 2 is your page name taken from your menu item
Related
Ok, I'm being really thick here and am having a few minor issues which are turning into major ones in my head:
I have a MainWindow that houses a tab control into which I have several "apps" sitting which all have their own solutions. I have built a neat "loading" control which is housed in the main window but is hidden and is only displayed when one of the displayed pages has a button clicked. However, I don't seem to be able to access the user control from the page.
As an example, I have an admin page which controls users in a database which wotks fine. When I click on the submit button I want to make the user control visible on the MainWindow and when the function is finished to hide the control. I know how to unhide and hide the control just not how to access it. I have attached a representation of the file structure below so you can see the issue I have accessing the MainWindow in the main solution from say the pageAdmin.xaml.
I have been googalizing this for a while and can't seem to find a solution that works. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I am open to any suggestions about how to handle this.
Andy
Just to be sure: what do you mean with "apps"? Do you have one WPF application which hosts different components?
Maybe PRISM (Microsoft Framework) is interesting for you. In PRISM you can dynamically load components from different dlls and host them in one WPF application. It has a build in messaging framwork which works very well and the diffetent dlls don't need any references among themselves.
I've created a simple dialog here with a list of people. All I want to do is a few simple things which are rather trivial in winforms. However I'm struggling to grasp how to do this in wpf with an mvvm approach. Could someone help me out please.
When the user hits the Add New Person button, I want a dialog to appear where a user can type in their Name and either hit OK or Cancel. If the user hits OK, it appends the person to the list. (keep in mind i'll add more edting fields for the users to input, for example last name...)
When the users has a single item in the list selected, i want them to give them the ability to click an 'edit' button showing a dialog similar to the one in the previous step, pre populated with the selected items data, so a user can edit the properties. Then depending on if they hit OK or Cancel the changes are committed.
Dropbox solution: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8sjpabfod08yil5/AddDeleteItems_basic.zip?dl=
To create and display dialogs using MVVM, you'll want to implement a dialog service pattern to handle such requests. This service would be called from within your view model.
There is a really informative Code Project article about this very topic (Showing Dialogs When Using The MVVM Pattern. My advice would be to read that article and then look through the source files accompanying the article. This should provide you with a very good starting point to achieve your use cases (custom dialogs) and can also be used for displaying standard dialogs too (e.g. open file, save file, browse folder etc).
The service pattern isn't the only way to implement this, in the following article I show how to do it using the same data-driven mechanism used for regular windows:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/820324/Implementing-Dialog-Boxes-in-MVVM
I suggest this tutorial for you to get started. However, for the dialog Xceed library has some cool custom controls that may help you.
i have create a few WPF applications in visual studio, and now i would like to create a final application to run all of the created apps in the final application. i would like to know how i can create a layout that displays the apps that are running inside the final app as buttons that can be clicked and cause the app to expand and allow the user to work on that app and then when finished return back to the final app and see the other apps to choose from. I imagine it would look like a Google chrome blank page that allows you see your familiar webpages and click on them to load them up. Any help or advice on what i should focus on to implement this would be much appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to read over this.
Consider using a VisualBrush this takes other WPF UI (your "apps") and uses their UI as a brush for another UI element.
Raj Kumar has a simple article called Visual Brush in WPF for details.
The bit you probably want is at the bottom where he shows you rendering a controls content in another control. The magic being binding the controls visual to the element name whos UI it should render.
my question is very simple. I am building an app(WPF CSharp) and I need user to give me paths that my app is going to use. Previously I added textboxes to show pathways, however, later I decided that it would be cool to use a Win 7 style Explorer navigation bar, which is a Breadcrumb bar. I found a great open source component for it here (http://www.codeproject.com/KB/tree/WPFBreadcrumbBar.aspx) however, I could not use it in my app. I added references both to Toolbox section and Project>References section. I can also add the control to my WPF window from Toolbox, yet I could not figure out how to fill it, how to change and show items in it etc. With respect to component author, I think article on Codeproject is not very 'understandable'(XAML? I want C# code please) and also PopulateItems event, for instance, did not work for me. So, if someone give me a basic example on how to add items to this bar easily, change items, or shortly, shows me how to make it work, I will appreciate for that,
Thanks.
I Guess it depends on how you want to present it. If you want to use a tab control to simulate the functionality you could go this route:
http://www.wpfblogger.com/post/BreadCrumb-TabControl-Style-for-WPF-40.aspx
All in WPF:
Developing a wizard application, user has to answer a number of simple questions before brought to the main app. The main app is then prefilled with the information obtained from the wizard.
I started with a Window which I then planned to add usercontrols to. The main window would have the user control in the first row, then Next and Previous buttons to control moving between the controls in the second row. This way I could easily control the logic to switch between screens like:
WizardControl1.IsVisible = false;
WizardControl2.IsVisible = true;
But for some reason, user controls do not have setter for IsVisible. Hurray.
So then I thought I would just use seperate windows for each section of the wizard. The problem with this approach is that now when stepping between, the window opens in random positions, and by steppign through the wizard with next, the next window pops up randomly which is really distracting and frustrating.
So how can I develop a wizard properly? I don't get why this is so hard...not exactly rocket science... replacing text and controls and storing input after pressing next/previous!
Thanks
Check this link:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/InternationalizedWizard.aspx
This is the article about building wizard in WPF by Josh Smith, it's seems to be nice pattern.
I found it's helpful for me, hope you'll too.
There is also an open source Avalon Wizard control on codeplex.
I'd probably aproach this using data binding and template selectors. Have the wizard form bind to a "WizardData" class, which exposes a list of "WizardPage" base classes.
The WizardData class can expose properties defining the correct info on the forms, and display a control for the main page that uses a template selector to determine the proper control to display based on the actual type of the particular wizard page.
It sounds like more work than it is, really. It also gives you the benefit of good separation between code and UI (all "work" is done by the WizardData and WizardPage classes), and the ability to test logic independent of the UI.
It's also a very WPF/MVVM way of approaching the problem.
I recognize this does not directly address your question, but I thought I'd mention it as a possible alternative. I've used Actipro's Wizard control with pretty good results, and when I have needed support, they have been very responsive. I am not affiliated with them in any way; I just like not having to write the plumbing to manage a wizard.
The property is called "Visibility".
I find that I do better when I dynamically add and removing controls rather than hide them.
I was looking for a Wizard solution too. I have the need to stick with stock WPF components so I implemented the wizard using a standard form and a tab control.
I only hide the tabs at runtime so there available in the IDE. At runtime just use Back, Next, Finish... to navigate thru the tab items
works good