Setting a property on the ViewModel from the View in WPF

Question

I have a dependency property on my ViewModel which is the DataContext for my View. The ViewModel has no reference to the View. The property on the ViewModel is going to reference a control on the view, but I need to be able to set this property in XAML.

How is this possible? One thought I had was to develop a custom control which has a Property property and a Value property, so you could do something like this in the View to set the property on the ViewModel:

<PropertySetter Property="{Binding MyViewModelDependencyProperty}" Value="{Binding ElementName=aControlOnMyView" />

Before I went down this route, I wanted to check if there was any other approach I could take?

Answer 1

First of all, the DataContext of the control should be the ViewModel object and not a property of it. Second, when you TwoWay bind a property of ViewModel to your control, changes in the control's value will update (in your case, 'set') the value of ViewModel's property.

Answer 2

My first reaction (and it's a strong one) is so say "Don't do that!" By giving your view model a reference to a part of your UI you are breaking the encapsulation that makes view models so powerful and useful.

For example, what if you want to unit test your view model or serialize it to disk? In each case the piece of your UI will not be present, because there will be no view at all. Your tests will miss coverage and your reconstitution will be incomplete.

If your view model actually needs references to UI objects and there is no better way to architect it, the best solution is to have the view model itself construct those controls it requires a reference to. Then your view can incorporate that control as the Content of a ContentPresenter via binding and provide a Style to configure the control, including a ControlTemplate to provide its content. Thusly:

public class MyViewModel
{
  public ListBox SpecialControl { get; set; }
  public MyViewModel()
  {
    SpecialControl = new ListBox();
  }
}

and

<DataTemplate TargetType="{x:Type local:MyViewModel}">
  <DataTemplate.Resources>
    <Style TargetType="ListBox" ... />
  </DataTemplate.Resources>
  ...
  <ContentPresenter Content="{Binding SpecialControl}" />
</DataTemplate>

Other possibilities are:

1. Have the view model actually derive from the Control class, then override OnApplyTemplate() and use GetTemplateChild to find a template item whose name starts with "PART_"
2. Implement an attached property that takes a property name, finds that property in the DataContext, and sets it to the DependencyObject to which the property is attached.
3. Implement your PropertySetter idea

My option #2 would look like this:

<DataTemplate TargetType="{x:Type MyViewModel}">
  ...
  <TextBox local:PropertyHelper.SetViewModelToThis="SpecialControl" />
  ...
</DataTemplate>

The code in the SetViewModelToThis PropertyChangedCallback would get the view model from the DataContext, reflect on it to find the "SpecialControl" property, then set it to the TextBox. Note that the implementation of SetViewModelToThis must take into account the possiblity that DataContext is not set right away, and that it maybe changed requiring the old setting to be removed and a new one made.

Answer 3

Thanks for the detailed reply Ray, but if I give you a bit more detail about the problem I'm trying to solve, you might get a better idea of why I mentioned the approach I did.

Basically, what I'm trying to do is set the focus to a textbox when the user hits a button. I've written an attached property which you can attach to the Button control, specify what the trigger event is (in this case the 'Click' event), and then what control to focus on. This works really nicely, and keeps everything in XAML.

However, I now have a use case where the focus should be set to an arbitrary text box from the click event on a button which is part of a toolbar. This toolbar is itself a user control which is sitting inside another user control, which is inside another user control! This toolbar needs to be reusable across various different forms, and each time, the control to set focus on after you click the button will be different per form.

That's why I had the idea of making the focus control (i.e. a textbox) a property on the view model itself (on my ViewModel base to be precise), and have the ViewModel base code (which the toolbar is bound to), set the focus to the control when the button is clicked (and the e.g. Add/Edit method is called on the ViewModel base).

In unit test land, the control to focus on property will be null, so it's .Focus() method just won't be called. So I can't see an issue there. My problem is then how you set the focus control property from XAML, which is why I had the PropertySetter idea.

I don't like the fact that the ViewModel has any reference to controls sitting on the view, but I can't see another way to achieve what I need. What if the logic that dictates whether to set focus to the control is quite complex? This would sit in the ViewModel surely? Therefore, is there any harm in the ViewModel having this UIElement property? It still knows nothing about the specific View it is bound to, it just knows that there is a control which it needs to set focus to when some action happens on the ViewModel.