How do I integrate a Silverlight DataGrid into an ASP.NET MVC View?

Question

I'm new to Silverlight and I've used it to create a simple datagrid that I'd like to include as part of a view within an ASP.NET MVC View (while using the existing master page layout).

What's the best way to do this? I haven't been able to find any examples...

Answer 1

You would simply embed a Silverlight application containing your grid into your MVC View markup. ASP.NET MVC just outputs HTML of course so at a basic level all you are doing is adding an HTML object tag to your page markup that will load your Silverlight .xap file.

e.g.

<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%">
          <param name="source" value="MySilverlightApplication.xap"/>
          <param name="background" value="white" />
          <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50401.0" />
          <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
          <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&amp;v=4.0.50401.0" style="text-decoration:none">
              <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/>
          </a>
        </object>

A potentially more tricky question is how will you load the data into your Silverlight grid control and that depends of course on where your data comes from. Typically data would be loaded into your Silverlight control via a call to a WCF web service.

Answer 2

Simply including the Silverlight application, via it's usual tag, is sufficient to include it in your view.

Are you asking how to "wire it up" to your data? That is more complicated, since the Silverlight object operates independently, and cannot access any data in your ViewModel.

If you need to pass it some initialisation parameters, the easiest way is to pass them via an "initParam" tag on the object:

<param name="initParams" value="your information here" />

Alternatively, you can access the query string from within the Silverlight application. Either way, if you need a lot of information you should look at exposing it via a webservice that your Silverlight application can then query.