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One of the cool new features in Silverlight 4 is the ability to data bind to indexed properties. This means that even if you don’t know at design time what properties you data object has you can still data bind to them.
The syntax is very similar to a normal data binding, only in this case you need to use the [key] syntax instead. For example in example below the FirstName is a regular property while the LastName below is an indexed property.
<StackPanel Name="LayoutRoot">
<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Margin="1">
<TextBlock Text="FirstName" Width="150"></TextBlock>
<TextBox Text="{Binding FirstName, Mode=TwoWay}" Width="500"></TextBox>
</StackPanel>
<StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Margin="1">
<TextBlock Text="LastName" Width="150"></TextBlock>
<TextBox Text="{Binding [LastName], Mode=TwoWay}" Width="500"></TextBox>
</StackPanel>
</StackPanel>
Creating the class to data bind to is simple. All you need to do is add a property with the following syntax:
public object this[string key]
{ get; set; }
In this example we are using a Peron class with a regular FirstName property and all others are dong using indexed properties. The complete class, including INotifyPropertyChanged looks like this:
public class Person : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
public Person()
{
PropertyChanged = (s, e) => { };
FirstName = "Maurice";
this["LastName"] = "de Beijer";
this["BabyName"] = "Kai";
}
private Dictionary<string, object> _data = new Dictionary<string, object>();
public object this[string key]
{
get
{
if (!_data.ContainsKey(key))
_data[key] = null;
return _data[key];
}
set
{
_data[key] = value;
PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(""));
}
}
public IEnumerable<string> Keys
{
get
{
return _data.Keys;
}
}
private string _firstName;
public string FirstName
{
get
{
return _firstName;
}
set
{
_firstName = value;
PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs("FirstName"));
}
}
public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
}
While not having to know the objects structure at design time is nice but in the XAML above we still hard coded the data bindings so that doesn’t buy us much yet. So fully utilize this we need to dynamically generate the UI as well. Fortunately that is quite easy to do with the following code:
void MainPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
var person = new Person();
DataContext = person;
foreach (var item in person.Keys)
{
var lbl = new TextBlock();
lbl.Text = item;
lbl.Width = 150;
var txt = new TextBox();
var binding = new Binding("[" + item + "]");
binding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay;
txt.SetBinding(TextBox.TextProperty, binding);
txt.Width = 500;
var line = new StackPanel();
line.Orientation = Orientation.Horizontal;
line.Children.Add(lbl);
line.Children.Add(txt);
line.Margin = new Thickness(1);
LayoutRoot.Children.Add(line);
}
}
And now you can see the result. Try it!
Happy Programming!
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