Is there an ItemsControl equivalent for text content?

Question

I have some data that I want to present in a FlowDocument. This will basically be a view that explains the data in a friendly way, with section headers, paragraphs of text, etc., and which I will display in a FlowDocumentScrollViewer.

To this end, I would like to create a bulleted list (<List>) out of the contents of an ObservableCollection. I know how to do that with ItemsControl, but how do I do it for ListItem elements in a FlowDocument, since they're part of the TextElement class hierarchy rather than the Control hierarchy? Is there an equivalent of ItemsControl for text content inside a TextBlock or FlowDocument?

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Edit: The article Sergey linked to is the perfect starting point. The only problem is that the article's code can only use a Section or a TableRowGroup as the items panel, and doesn't yet support using a <List>. But that was trivial to fix -- just a matter of adding this code at the end of ItemsContent.GenerateContent, just before the final else:

else if (panel is List)
    ((List) panel).ListItems.Add((ListItem) element);

Answer 1

Instead of using a FlowDocument, you can use an ItemsControl and change the panel used to display items to a WrapPanel. This will allow you use the ItemsControl as you want, but change its display semantics to a WrapPanel (which I believe functions like a FlowDocument. You'd do it something like this:

<ItemsControl>
    <ItemsControl.ItemsPanelTemplate>
        <WrapPanel />
    </ItemsControl.ItemsPanelTemplate>
</ItemsControl>

You can set any properties on the inner WrapPanel as you desire.

Answer 2

I think you are looking for the List element: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.documents.list.aspx

Bubblewrap points out a few more details. You'd likely bind to the ListItems property and need to use a ValueConverter to convert your source list to a list of type ListItemsCollection.

Bubblewrap points out that this is readonly and that the ListItemsCollection has an internal constructor. So...

I think what you'd have to do is this:

<ContentControl Content="{Binding TheArrayOfText, Converter={StaticResource StringsToListConverter}" />

This is pretty unfortunate, but I think it would work. You'd have to write a converter to create a new List object and call .Add( on each item.

Answer 3

What you are looking for is possible, but requires significant amount of coding. Fortunately, Vincent Van Den Berghe posted a nice article on the MSDN describing how to Create Flexible UIs With Flow Documents And Data Binding , including the code!