Designer Silverlight

This is little more than a pointer to a fantastic post by Mike over at Mike’s Code Blog, but I figured it was worth passing along. Mike’s post is focused on finding which item was double clicked, while mine is on determining when the double clicking happened on an item at all.

 I’ve recently come up against a problem in which we were attaching a doubleclick event to our listview, only to discover it fires when we did something like click on the scrollbar quickly. Since we only wanted it to fire when we were double clicking on the listview item, we had to come up with some way of figuring out where in the listview the user had clicked.

Mike’s code made it easy… I’m reproducing our permutation of it here:

First, we put our event pointer in the XAML like so:

<ListView MouseDoubleClick=”ListViewDoubleClick”>

Then we put this in the code behind:

protected void ListView_MouseDoubleClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
     //grab the original element that was doubleclicked on and search from child to parent until
    //you find either a ListViewItem or the top of the tree
    DependencyObject originalSource = (DependencyObject)e.OriginalSource;
    while ((originalSource != null) && !(originalSource is ListViewItem)) 
     {
          originalSource = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(originalSource); 
     }
       //if it didn’t find a ListViewItem anywhere in the hierarch, it’s because the user
      //didn’t click on one. Therefore, if the variable isn’t null, run the code
      if (originalSource != null)
      {
         //code here
      }
} 

That’s it!

So you want grid lines in your listview, huh? Something that looks a little like this?

OK, we can do this the easy way and the hard way.
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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.

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