Tag Archives: ListView

Updating a View Model from Inside a Collection

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My last post suggested a concept of having a `Selectable` Model, which effectively wraps a model in a class with a generic item and an `IsSelected` property. This does, however, present a slight issue. What if you want to update the view model, based on the item being selected, or de-selected?

Say, for example, that from my previous post, you had a property on the Person class called Wages, and wanted to display the total wages of all the selected people. You would have defined `TotalCostSummary` in the ViewModel, and bound it in the View.

My solution is to pass a delegate into the Selectable item. Here’s how I did it (this doesn’t really make any sense without referring back to the first post).

SelectableItem Model

In the `SelectableItem`, define a new property like so:

        private Action _updateMethod = null;
        public Action IsSelectedChangedMethod
        {
            get { return _updateMethod; }
            set
            {
                _updateMethod = value;
            }
        }

And change `IsSelected` to looks like this:

        private bool _isSelected;
        public bool IsSelected
        {
            get { return _isSelected; }
            set
            {
                _isSelected = value;                
                RaisePropertyChanged();
                
                if (_updateMethod != null)
                    _updateMethod();
            }
        }

ViewModel

        private void UpdateTotalCost()
        {
            _summary = SelectablePeople.Where(a => a.IsSelected).Sum(s => s.Item.Wages);
            RaisePropertyChanged(() => TotalCostSummary);
        }

Next, change the code to define the list:

List<Person> population = GetPeople();
SelectablePeople = new ObservableCollection<SelectableItem<Person>>(population
	.Select(n => new SelectableItem<Person>() 
	{ 
		Item = n, IsSelected = false, IsSelectedChangedMethod = (() => UpdateTotalCost())  
	}).ToList());

Conclusion

The net effect is that the changes now made inside the model can bubble up to the ViewModel, but the separation of the two has been maintained.

Binding IsSelected Method in the ListView Control in WinRT

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Basically, it’s not possible. However, this is the best (and only that works) workaround that I found.

Subclass the Listview

I tried everything. Absolutely everything.

I tried straightforward binding – that doesn’t work for IsSelected.
I tried using WinRT Xaml Toolkit – didn’t work.
I tried using Setters – they don’t work for WinRT.

Finally, I came across this solution; here’s the listview subclass (stolen directly from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15994021/listviewitem-isselected-binding-works-for-wpf-but-not-for-winrt):

    public class ListViewEx : ListView
    {
        protected override void PrepareContainerForItemOverride(Windows.UI.Xaml.DependencyObject element, object item)
        {
            base.PrepareContainerForItemOverride(element, item);
            
            ListViewItem listItem = element as ListViewItem;
            Binding binding = new Binding();
            binding.Mode = BindingMode.TwoWay;
            binding.Source = item;
            binding.Path = new PropertyPath("IsSelected");
            listItem.SetBinding(ListViewItem.IsSelectedProperty, binding);
        }
    }

Obviously this does restrict the IsSelected property name. My class looks something like this:

    public class Person
    {
        public string Name { get; set; }
        …
    }

I didn’t want to add an IsSelected property to this; because it doesn’t directly relate to the entity. My solution was to wrap this inside a class such as this:

    public class SelectableItem<T> : INotifyPropertyChanged
    {
        private T _item;
        public T Item 
        {
            get { return _item; }
            set
            {
                _item = value;
                RaisePropertyChanged();
            }
        }

        private bool _isSelected;
        public bool IsSelected
        {
            get { return _isSelected; }
            set
            {
                _isSelected = value;                
                RaisePropertyChanged();
            }
        }

        public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
        protected void RaisePropertyChanged([CallerMemberName] string name = "")
        {
            if (PropertyChanged != null)
            {
                PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name));
            }
        }
}

And build it like this:

                List<Person> population = GetPeople();
                SelectablePeople = new ObservableCollection<SelectableItem<Person>>(population
                    .Select(n => new SelectableItem<Person>() { Item = n, IsSelected = false }).ToList());

So, finally, bind the collection to the new subclassed listview like this:

        <controls:ListViewEx x:Name="ItemListView" Grid.Column="0" Grid.Row="1"
                        ItemsSource="{Binding SelectablePeople}"                        
                        SelectionMode="Multiple"                        
                        Width="Auto" Height="Auto" >

            <controls:ListViewEx.ItemTemplate>
                <DataTemplate x:Name="MyTemplate">
                    <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
                        <TextBlock                            
                            Text="{Binding Item.Name}"/>
                    </StackPanel>
                </DataTemplate>
            </controls:ListViewEx.ItemTemplate>

        </controls:ListViewEx>