MVVM + Datacontext + DataTemplate + Blend = problems

Question

Hi All,

I'm currently using MVVM in a WPF project, all works very well. I have one Master view and many Detail views that I manage using a currentView property in my MasterViewModel. By using a datatemplate, I bind a view to a viewmodel. In fact, my master view has a contentcontrol whose content property is binded to my CurrentView property. When I set this currentview property to a viewmodel or another, it calls the corresponding template.

My problem is that using this, my detail views doesn't have explicit datacontext because it is placed by my datatemplate. So in blend, when I open my view to edit its design, I have no datas to bind to my view. If I set a datacontext to my detailview, in blend I can see all datas I can bind but in runtime, the datacontext set by datatemplate is overrided by the datacontext set in my detailview, so I have no datas during runtime.

Does anyone knows how I can create a good MVVM project, with views managed by datatemplates and with datacontext that we can see with Blend ?

Thanks,

Answer 1

I solved a similar issue in this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/824539/how-can-i-use-expression-blend-to-edit-a-datatemplate-created-in-visual-studio

Answer 2

I've got a blog post on this issue: http://www.robfe.com/2009/08/design-time-data-in-expression-blend-3/

My post is all about showing data in blend without having to have that data displayed or even created at runtime.