How to create a Silverlight control that has two content areas

Question

I want to create a Silverlight 2 control that has two content areas. A Title and a MainContent. So the control would be:

<StackPanel>
<TextBlock Text=" CONTENT1 "/>
<Content with CONTENT2 "/>
</StackPanel>

When I use the control I should just be able to use:

<MyControl Text="somecontent">main content </MyControl>

How can I create such a control?

Answer 1

What you wanted is a Silverlight version of the WPF HeaderedContentControl You can find a try here. http://leeontech.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/headeredcontentcontrol-sample/

Answer 2

You can do that easily with the ContentProperty attribute.

Then you can define your code behind as:

[ContentProperty("Child")]
public partial class MyControl: UserControl
{
 public static readonly DependencyProperty ChildProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("Child", typeof(UIElement), typeof(MyControl), null);

 public UIElement Child
 {
  get { return (UIElement)this.GetValue(ChildProperty); }
  set
  {
   this.SetValue(ChildProperty, value);
   this.content.Content = value;
  }
 }

What that will do is any default content within your tags (<MyControl Text="somecontent">main content </MyControl>) - will be set as the Child property on your class. Then once it's been set you can assign it to any control you like.

Edit:

You can have as many contents as you like, but you can only have 1 auto-content (which is designated via the ContentProperty attribute). If you want two you could do:

<MyControl>
  <MyControl.Content1>Hello World</MyControl.Content1>
  <MyControl.Content2>Goodbye World</MyControl.Content2>
</MyControl>

All you have to do is make sure you have the matching dependency properties in your code. Then when the property is set, just assign it to a parent content control in your XAML.