WPF is a beautiful thing most days, but every so often it rears up and slaps you in the face when all you think you have left is a fairly trivial bit of UI functionality left. Then you are burning HOURS making sure you haven't done something completely stupid in your bindings, and Dr. Googling for anyone else who's run into the same problem. The burn isn't that it's a particularly complex thing to do, it's that there end up being so many variations of things to try, most of which won't work for one reason or another, and many other suggestions simply never worked or were even tried. This burns hours upon hours. Even if I say to myself "This isn't that important, set it aside and come back to it later" it's still smouldering in my mind and within a couple minutes I'm back trying something else that comes to mind, and burning more time on it.
In this case all I had left were two little unrelated UI interactivity features that I wanted to polish off before continuing with the next set of requirements.
#1. I present details in a list that is sorted by date. In editing an item within the list I can edit the date. The logical behaviour is that the list should be re-sorted.
#2. Presented in the list rather than using separate views for viewing and editing the details I wanted to swap out a data template (or user control) inside the list item content. (Click a button to expand for edit/review, and another to save/restore to summary mode.)
WPF has Collection View Source objects that sounded like they should have fit my needs for item #1. (instead of binding directly to observable collections) WPF also has DataTemplateSelectors which looked like they should service my needs for item #2. All set! Not quite....
CollectionViewSource allows you to sort sure enough, but editing the collection items doesn't cause the view source to refresh the sorting/grouping. I spent HOURS of digging and experimenting with different options to tackle this including extending ObservableCollection to provide the sorting, (see here) refreshing via Move operations, to trying to hook into the CollectionViewSource.View.Refresh() with limited success. Finally I hit paydirt with someone that got fed up with exactly the same problem. (see here)
After finally tackling #1 I had renewed energy to tackle #2. (which ironically I had shelved in order to tackle issue #1) I had arm-wrestled with the data template selectors earlier and quickly found while they were good at picking a template, they did not listen for changes to anything they were bound to in order to make that selection so they were only good for a one-off choice. This time the inspiration for the solution came from a little gem of an idea I glanced upon from Stack Overflow (see here), specifically "You could even make your data template a ContentControl, and use a trigger to change the ContentTemplate." I had used DataTriggers before and knew I could swap out individual controls between view and edit variations but I was looking to swap out an entire template in one go. Using a data template containing a content control, and the data trigger to swap out the content template was bloody BRILLIANT!
Finally these WPF UI thorns in my side have been removed and I can resume work without these damn things flaring up to burn up even MORE time. I find it very strange that implementing such functionality was such a chore within WPF, but in case Randall Doser ever comes across this blog... #2, definitely #2.
:)
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