How to display list of items.

 

In order to display a list of items we obviously need two things:

• a list of items
• some UI control prepared for the task of displaying lists

WPF is quite liberal about what can be our list of items. It can be a Collection or even IEnumerable. Of course it can work with more sophisticated types but more about it some other time.
When choosing a control we should know something about WPF Content Model idea. For our task best one will be a control implementing ItemsControl content model. When we’ve got our data and control the rest is easy. We just need to bind data to control and we do it like this:

Application instance like usually :

  1: <Application

  2:     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

  3:     StartupUri="View/MainWindow.xaml"

  4:     />

MainWindow that way:

  1: <Window

  2:     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

  3:     xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

  4:     x:Class="SimpleList.MainWindow"

  5:     >

  6:     <ListBox ItemsSource="{Binding Path=Numbers}"/>

  7: </Window>

  1: using System.Collections.Generic;

  2: using System.Windows;

  3:

  4: namespace SimpleList

  5: {

  6:     public partial class MainWindow : Window

  7:     {

  8:         public MainWindow()

  9:         {

 10:             InitializeComponent();

 11:

 12:             Numbers = new List<int>();

 13:

 14:             Numbers.Add(1);

 15:             Numbers.Add(2);

 16:             Numbers.Add(3);

 17:

 18:             this.DataContext = this;

 19:         }

 20:

 21:         public IList<int> Numbers { get; set; }

 22:     }

 23: }

Important things we should remember are:

• Content Model idea
• DataContext dependency property provided by FrameworkContentElement
• the whole data binding mechanism
• the fact that we can define part of a class as partial class and e.g. set DataContext property that way

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