How to programatically detect if a DataForm is in edit mode

Question

I'm using a DataForm in Silverlight 4. Several DataForms, actually, and they share a common RIA Services context. Here's the problem I'm having...

If I start editing a DataField in one of the DataForms, then click on a button that calls Context.SubmitChanges(), I get the following error:

�Entity 'foo' is currently being edited and has uncommitted changes. A call to BeginEdit must be followed by a call to EndEdit or CancelEdit before changes can be submitted.�

Note that the "Submit Changes" button is external to the DataForms and applies to the RIA Services context that is shared between the DataForms (which are each in separate tabs of a tab control).

I'd like to be able to avoid this problem by detecting, in code, when a DataForm is in editing mode. When I'm in debug mode, I can see that the DataForm has properties such as "IsEditing" and "CanCancelEdit" that indicate that it is in editing mode, but these properties do not seem to be available for use in my code.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I'm not sure what IsEditing and CanCancelEdit are, they aren't documented.

However there is a Mode property that is DataFormMode enumeration, ReadOnly, Edit and AddNew. There is also an IsItemChanged property which indicates if any actual changes have been made editing began.

Answer 2

Since none of the available properties provided the information I needed, I ended up creating my own private field (in the UserControl that contains the DataForm) called _isEditing which is initialized to "false". In the DataForm.BeginningEdit event handler I set it to "true" and in the DataForm.EditEnded event handler I set it to "false". I then created a read-only public property called IsEditing to make the value available externally.

Answer 3

You can call DataForm.CommitEdit() before calling DomainContext.SubmitChanges() and avoid the error entirely.