WPF prism accessing view elements from shell

Question

Hi, I have a shell with some buttons and tabs and a few modules in my application. Each module has a view with some elements like datagrids, stackpanels, text boxes, etc. They all have a name attribute. Now when I fire an event on a shell (like click a button) I would like to be able to something with those elements (like clearing all the information written by the user in provided textboxes). The problem is, shell does not see those elements and cannot recognize them. Is there a way to access them?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Answer 1

I'd suggest you take an approach like what the Stocktrader Reference Implementation does with CompositeCommands. Basically a CompositeCommand is an implementation of ICommand that contains a collection of other ICommands. In the RI, the CompositeCommands are exposed as static properties on a centrally available class.

In your case, you could have a composite ClearCommand. The viewmodel for the shell would expose this to the shell view so you could hook up, say, your Clear button to it.

The viewmodels for the various modules would then hook into this ClearCommand:

GlobalCommands.ClearCommand.RegisterCommand(new DelegateCommand(x => ClearAllFields()));