Programmatically triggering the HyperlinkButton navigation

Question

I'm using the Silverlight 3 HyperlinkButton and I want to programmatically trigger the navigation that normally occurs when the button is clicked. There does not appear to be a public method that supports this.

The OnClick method is protected so I could inherit from this control to gain access to this method from a custom control but is there a better way to go about this?

Looking at the implementation of the OnClick method using Reflector does not give me an obvious hint for a better way and the complexity of the code makes me wonder if there is a good reason for not allowing this event to be triggered programmatically. The lowest level managed code call is to MS.Internal.XcpImports.NavigateToSafeURINative and I don't see any public method in the code path that I could use.

Answer 1

The HtmlWindow.Navigate should do the trick as follows, relying on a unique target name to make sure it opens in a different tab or window to the current window hosting the silverlight application.

var hostingWindow = HtmlPage.Window;
hostingWindow.Navigate(siteHyperLinkbutton.NavigateUri, siteHyperLinkbutton.TargetName);

Answer 2

You could link the button to a Command, then trigger the command anywhere from Code using Command.Execute(). Psuedo code:

XAML:

<UserControl x:Class="ClassName"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
             xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
             xmlns:commands="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Practices.Composite.Presentation.Commands;assembly=Microsoft.Practices.Composite.Presentation">
    <Button commands:Click.Command="{Binding MyCommand}" />
</UserControl>

CODE (behind or MVVM):

public class ClassName
{    
    ///Class constructor
    public ClassName()
    {        /// implement the command behaviour as a delegate
    MyCommand = new DelegateCommand<object>(
         delegate{ 
                 /// do your OnClick() behaviour implementation here 
                 }
        );
    }

    private DelegateCommand<object> _myCommand;
    public DelegateCommand<object> MyCommand
    {
        get { return _myCommand; }
        set { myCommand=value;
              OnPropertyChanged("MyCommand");}
     }

    /// Another method called from somewhere else in code
    void SomeOtherMethod()
    {
      MyCommand.Execute(null);
    }
}

This works particularly well in MVVM world.

HTH,
Mark