best practice for rendering a set of controls in WPF?

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best practice for rendering a set of controls in WPF?

I'm creating a WPF application that is similar in layout to Microsoft Outlook, where you have some navigation buttons on the left and then a grid on the right hand side that displays content. I'd like this content area (which is just a Grid, split into a left side of specific Width, and then Width="*" for the right side) to change based on the selected item on the left side. It will render a different set of labels and buttons, etc when the item changes on the left side. I was curious what would be considered the best way to render content on the right side of the form, specifically:

Use a Canvas control, and place controls on it and "swap" Canvas controls out as the selected item changes?
Create some sort of a User Control to swap out content in this area?

I realize this question is subjective, but I'm looking for feedback from more experienced developers on how they usually handle this kind of work.

EDIT: The right hand side needs to render a specific UI for each selected item - in other words the UI on the right side is custom to the selected item on the left.

+2 A:

What you're probably looking for here is a data template. If your right hand pane was a ContentControl, you can bind the content to the selected item on the left hand side. Then, you can define data templates for each object type you have in your list on the left.

There's almost never need to use code to swap content around in WPF - that's what the DataTemplate behaviour is designed for.

Dan Puzey 2010-07-20 21:59:35

@Dan Puzey: I've used a DataTemplate before to render a set of objects (for example, I had an "Employee" object that implemented INotifyPropertyChanged and defined a DataTemplate that had a bunch of TextBlocks for a name, that populated a Listbox.) For this however, the right hand pane is just the other half of a Grid that needs to display a completely different set of controls each time the selected item changed. So if the selected item on the left side was "Reminders" the right side would render a UI for that, if the selected item was "Calls" the right side would render a UI for that, etc.

Randster 2010-07-20 22:12:17

If your left-hand list is bound to a collection of arbitrary objects (e.g. `myRemindersModel`, `myCallsModel`, etc) then you can use exactly the same mechanism to render the right hand side as you did for your Employee object.

Dan Puzey 2010-07-20 22:50:43

+2 A:

Could you use a TabControl with the tabs on the left side, and then style the tab header to look non-tab like? does it NEED to be a gridview with a split?

John Gardner 2010-07-20 22:26:42

@John Gardner: well, I feel like an idiot. I suppose that would, in fact, work out much better. I'll have to figure out the styling for the tab headers. Glad I asked before I invested too much time into the UI. Thanks again.

Randster 2010-07-20 22:38:07

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best practice for rendering a set of controls in WPF?

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