Designer Silverlight

This is just a quick note on creating a ListView style with the appropriate GridView style and template assignments.

Normally, I’ve been creating listviews that look like this:

<ListView x:Name=”MyListView”
               ItemContainerStyle=”{DynamicResource MyListViewItemContainerStyle}”>
    <ListView.View>
         <GridView ColumnHeaderContainerStyle=”{DynamicResource MyListViewHeaderStyle}”
                         ColumnHeaderTemplate=”{DynamicResource MyGridColumnHeaderTemplate}”> 

I did this because I didn’t know exactly how to assign these styles and templates to the ListView Style. In the style, ColumnHeaderContainerStyle and ColumnHeaderTemplate are not properties of the ListView, they are properties of the GridView… which you can’t create a style for.

Instead, you can encapsulate all the information above in the following style.

<Style x:Key=”CustomListViewStyle” TargetType=”{x:Type ListView}”>
      <Setter Property=”GridView.ColumnHeaderContainerStyle” Value=”{DynamicResource MyListViewHeaderStyle}” />
      <Setter Property=”GridView.ColumnHeaderTemplate” Value=”{DynamicResource MyGridColumnHeaderTemplate}” />
      <Setter Property=”ItemContainerStyle” Value=”{DynamicResource MyListViewItemContainerStyle}” />
</Style>

Problem solved.

ListView header Styling is one of the most difficult styling pieces I’ve had to deal with. Part of this is because it is just another part of the seemingly endlessly complex listview. The other part is just because of the way the styling for the listview is put together in WPF.

In this post, we’re going to change the default color of the header (background and foreground) and make the headers look more like bubbles. Why? Because we can! (Everytime I say that, somewhere a usability expert loses a little bit of their soul.)

Take note that anything done in this will affect the whole header. If you’re looking to do something to one individual column in the header, you need to go to this post on ColumnHeaders (coming soon). See the bottom of this post for more details.

As a point of note, the easy way in this particular case involves going directly into the XAML and the hard way involves going through the steps in Blend. The easy way is posted at the bottom.

Now for the hard way. First, go to your listview, right click on it and go to:

Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…

Read the rest of this entry »

So, after months of delay I finally figured that there are probably some people out there who want to figure out how to make the WPF listview look the way they want it to look.

A quick note: I will be dealing almost entirely with the listview look. If you want the listview to do something (functionality) or look a certain way and you can’t find the answer here, leave a comment with your suggestion and I’ll try to blog about it and place a link to the answer in my listview FAQ.

My goal is to create a significant repository on getting the stinking listview to look the way you want and do what you want it to do.

You’re probably here because, compared with most of the WPF controls, Blend gives very little guidance on how to deal with the listview (even though you use the listview for practically everything you do).  So we’re going to start with the basic structure of the listview. This is what the basic listview looks like in the XAML.

<ListView>
      <ListView.View>
            <GridView>
                  <GridViewColumn Header=”Column Header“/>
            </GridView>
      </ListView.View>
</ListView>

So this post will start out giving basic guidance on what to edit when you’re trying to edit the various parts of the listview. I will update these sections with links and tutorials on listview specific tasks as time goes on.

Read the rest of this entry »