Will PRISM help?

Question

I am considering building a application using PRISM (Composite WPF Guidance/Library). The application modules will be vertically partitioned (i.e. Customers, Suppliers, Sales Orders, etc). This is still all relatively easy... I also have a Shell with a main region were all the work will happen but now I need the following behavior: I need a menu on my main Shell and when each one of the options gets clicked (like customers, suppliers, etc) I need to find the module and load it into the region (Only 1 view at a time)?

Does anybody know of any sample applications with this type of behavior? All the samples are more focused on having all the modules loaded on the main shell? And should my menu bar also be a module?

[UPDATE] How do I inject a module into a region based on it being selected from a menu? All the examples show that the module injects the view into the region on initialize? I need to only inject the view if the module is selected on a menu?

Answer 1

It's not clear what you mean saying "find the module and load it into the region". You can load module's view and add it to shell. Composite UI app block and CompositeWPF are built on top of the IoC pattern. It means that your modules should inject their menu items in shell's menu strip or subscribe to events generated by shell.

Answer 2

You could have your main region be a ContentControl, this way only 1 view will be active at a time. You can also load your modules "On Demand". There is a Quickstart that shows you how to do this. You should also keep in mind that if the module was already initialized once, initializing it for a second time will not execute the Initialize() method on the module. It might be useful that when you click on the menu, this will load the module on demand (which will not load the view yet) and then you can fire an event through EventAggregator, so the module can now add the view (use the named approach for not adding the view twrice) and the Activate the view (which will make sure the view is shwon in the region).

Hope this helps, Julian

Answer 3

Just finished watching Brian Noyes on Prism at dnrTV. This answered all my question...

Answer 4

to save you time, search on john papa's screen framework. It will be more easy if you have 3rd object(screen conductor) to handle your screens in showing or hiding from regions