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I was thinking of ways to implement a generic View search. What I mean here is say a Window has many controls (including usercontrols,customcontrols, etc). I want to implement a generic search box on the top of window which searches any Text in the window and highlight them.

I wanted to know is there a generic way of doing this or has anyone tried such UI based search.

I was searching through internet and found some nice links like below::
http://khason.net/blog/search-and-highlight-any-text-on-wpf-rendered-page/ which says search and highlight any Text in WPF rendered page but it doesnt work when there are lot of UserControls and CustomControls.

  • I myself did some research and thought of going through the VisualTree,LogicalTree, etc but I did not find them satisfactory.

  • Some say do it using attached behaviors or by data binding but that also did not help me. Because even if i achieved search using this technique, the problem is highlighting. Say there are 4 TextBoxes having different background colors and I highlight background to Yellow when Text is found, I have no way of removing the highlighting when Text is not found because I don't know the previous background color of TextBox.

Ok , enough of my thoughts. I would like to simply accept I am going nowhere in my thoughts. So people I want some guidance in implementing UI search. Also if you people can tell me how I can make it generic, it will be useful!!