Is Databinding a good way to connect a view to a model

Question

I am thinking about the design of a WPF or Silverlight application. I am planning to use MVC (or another such design pattern)

Witch ever of the design patterns I choose, I need to connect to view to the model (or presenter) – is databinding a good way of doing this?

(In the past with WinForms applications I have found that Databinding give lots of problem in the long run and does not fulfil its promise. It is the same with WPF and Siverlight?)

Answer 1

I recommend you take a look at the Model-View ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. Here is a very good video you should take a look at: Jason Dolinger on Model-View-ViewModel. Two-way data binding in WPF is very powerful.

Answer 2

Data binding in WPF goes far beyond what you could achieve in Winforms. It is intrinsic to the platform and prevalent throughout. I would argue you can't understand WPF without understanding its data binding system.

It's not without its pitfalls, to be sure. Broken bindings are often not as obvious as you may like, but improvements have been made to help you identify and flag these issues.

HTH, Kent

Answer 3

Yes, you should definitely definitely use data binding. While WinForms and ASP.NET were always a struggle to get anything data bound consistently and in a maintainable manner, Silverlight and WPF are built from the ground up for data binding pleasure.

• Binding is two-way so you don't have to write tedious plumbing code to move data in and out of your model. Just implement INotifable and away you go.
• Converters allow you to write code to handle the way things are bound if the defaults aren't working. Using converters (which are dead-simple to write) you can bind booleans to visibility settings, strings to images, integers to background colors, and so on. The sky's the limit.
• Patterns such as MVVM are perfect for the rich data-binding support in WPF and Silverlight. MVVM lets you have the best of both worlds: loosely coupled code together with data binding.
• Element binding lets you bind the property one element to the property of another element. Together with converters, this gives you impressive power to do things like bind the current position of a slider control to the selected index of a list control. Both ways.
• Deep binding means you can bind to the property of a property of your model. Not that you always should, but you can.
• Binding is almost magical in its dynamic-ness. As long as your model continues to support the same bound properties, binding will continue to work even if the static type of the model changes. Binding is also crazy flexible. You can bind to collections, interfaces, complex objects, (almost) anything you like.
• DataContexts can be used to set up data-binding at a page, control, or container level. Children of the container then inherit the same data-context. This lets you bind once at the page level and then use binding paths for the rest of the page.