CREATING VIEWMODEL TO VIEW MAPPINGS

One of my favorite approaches to creating View/ViewModel pairs in WPF it to use data templates. Say you have a ViewModel called MyViewModel and it should be displayed in the UI as the View MyView.

We can create a fairly straightforward DataTemplate defined as:

<DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type local:MyViewModel}">
  <local:MyView />
</DataTemplate>

Whenever we add the ViewModel instance into a Window or a ContentControl, it will render using the DataTemplate, which just happens to be the View.

If we ever run into a dynamic scenario in which we are unable to easily add static XAML as a resource dictionary into an existing resource dictionary, as we might in a Prism module scenario, we can use the following method instead. Just declare it in our MainWindow or Application and expose it through an interface inside that can be accessed through a service container.

1. public void RegisterViewModelToViewMapping<tviewmodel, tview="">()  
2. {  
3.     DataTemplate template = new DataTemplate(typeof(TViewModel));  
4.     template.VisualTree = new FrameworkElementFactory(typeof(TView));  
5.   
6.     DataTemplateKey key = new DataTemplateKey(typeof(TViewModel));  
7.     Resources.Add(key, template);  
8. }  

WPF UIELEMENT CACHING IN THE CONTENTCONTROL »