Should I be using Expression Blend to design really dynamic UIs?

Question

My company's product is, at its core, a framework for developing metadata-driven UIs. I don't know how to characterize it less succinctly than that, and hope I won't need to for purposes of this question, but we'll see.

I've been trying to come up to speed on WPF, and have been building UI prototypes here and there, and recently I decided to see if I could use Expression Blend to help with the design of these UIs. And I'm pretty mystified at this point.

It appears to me as though Expresssion Blend is designed with the expectation that you already know all of the objects that are going to be present in the UI at design time. But our program generates these object dynamically at runtime.

For instance, a data row might be presented in a horizontal StackPanel containing alternating TextBlocks (for captions) and TextBoxes (for data fields). The number of these objects depends on metadata about the number of columns in the data row. I can, pretty readily, write code that runs through a metadata record and populates a StackPanel dynamically, setting up the binding of all of the controls to properties in either the data or metadata. (A TextBox's Width might be bound to metadata, while its Text is bound to data.)

But I can't even begin to figure out how to do something like this in Expression Blend. I can manually create all these controls, so that I have a set of controls that I can apply styles to and work out the visual design of the app, but it's really a pain to do this.

I can write code that goes through my data model and emits XAML for all these controls, I suppose, and then copy and paste it. But I'm going to feel really stupid if it turns out there a way to do this sort of thing in Expression Blend and I've dropped back and punted because I'm too dim to figure out the right way to think of it.

Is this enough information for someone to try formulating an answer?

Answer 1

I think expression blend is a very good choice ESPECIALLY if you want to design dynamic, datadriven UIs. You can use Blend to desgin DataTemplates that define how a single dataobject is to be presented to the screen. For example, if you have an object of type Person you can define the controls like textboxes, border etc. that then are to be generated automatically for each Person in your list. You can then fill your ItemsControls (DataGrid, ListView, TreeView ...) with those dynamic databojects and WPF knows how to render them. If a Persopn is removed form the list, the generated visual item will be removed too. This is just a simple example the whole notion of dynamic data is deeply baked into WPF and you can access these features using blend.

To be able to design the datatemplates in expression blend you need to provide sample designtime data.

Also to be effective with all this it is of high advantage if you stick with the MVVM design.