Adding and changing usercontrol at run time in a WPF application

Question

I have a situation as follows, i am going to use WPF for first time, so any suggestion abt how to proceed whould be great: I hav a drop down, when i select any item from it - it should change the structure of controls in same window. New controls contain - two menu items and a text box and a list box. Selecting one menuitem will display text box and other will show list box. Now for each item in initial combo box i will have different info for the each menu items.

Problems: Say i have 10 items in combo box - and 2 menu items for each - so 20 different stuff to show. -- How should i declare these 20 different stuffs -- How should i load each when a particular combination is selected

Answer 1

If you want to show multiple sets of controls at once, dd all of the controls to your window and set their Visibility using a data binding, and use the ComboBox to update the propertie the controls are bound to.

Or if you only want to show one control at a time, just use a DataContext from the ComboBox:

<Window.DataContext>
  <x:Array x:Key="myItems">
    <local:Item MenuItem1="abc" MenuItem2="def" />
    <local:Item MenuItem1="ghi" MenuItem2="jkl" />
    ...
    <local:Item MenuItem1="ghi" MenuItem2="jkl" />
  </x:Array>
</Window.DataContext>


<Grid>
  ...
  <ComboBox x:Name="selection" ItemsSource="{Binding}">
     ...

  <StackPanel DataContext="{Binding /}" ...>
    <MenuItem Header="{Binding MenuItem1}" OnClick="DisplayListBox" />
    <MenuItem Header="{Binding MenuItem2}" OnClick="DisplayTextBox" />
    <TextBox Visibility="Hidden" ... />
    <ListBox Visibility="Hidden" ... />
  </StackPanel>

</Grid>

with appropriate code for DisplayListBox and DisplayTextBox

Answer 2

You should look at ControlTemplate. You can define a set of templates, then apply them to a control causing them to be whatever you want them to be. so, when the item changed event fires on your dropdown, load and apply the template that you want.

<!--- your xaml file --->
    <Control x:Name="Main"/>


// you CS file....
    OnItemChanage(....)
    {
        if ( Main!= null ) 
        Main.Template = MyNewTemplate;
    }