Hide navigation bar but remember the history in wpf frame - wpf

Question

I have a frame on my main window. I have an ItemsControl in which I show the vertical menu from which user can select any Item and the page corresponding to specific Item is shown in the frame.
This works well.
When I set NavigationUIVisibility to Automatic:
1) Navigation Bar is displayed at the top.
2) If I enter some data in a textbox in page1 and then if I navigate away to page2.
Now again if I navigate to page1, the text in the textbox is there.
What I want is:
1) Hide the Navigation bar. For that I have set NavigationUIVisibility to Hidden.
This works good.
2) I want frame to remember history as I discussed in point 2 in above topic.
So, How to remember history when NavigationUIVisibility is set to hidden.
Or is there any other way to remember history when navigation bar is hidden.

Answer 1

You can re-style NavigationFrames and NavigationWindows so that they look completely different. In fact all of these images below are NavigationWindows, even the one without any navigation UI at all.
I put together an open source library for re-styling these at http://winchrome.codeplex.com so you can just steal the parts you need from the style. In fact if you just want a navigating panel with menu on the left, then its already covered in some of the demos for that project.
To answer your question as to why the TextBox clears it depends very much on what you are navigating to, and for some cases this is independent of the history.
Lets start simply, lets consider we have MyPage.xaml
<Page x:class="MyPage"...>
<TextBox/>
</Page>
If you are navigating to the same MyPage that you were before, then it will still have the same values in it.
If you are navigating to a new MyPage() then by default the TextBox will be empty.
If the navigation history is turned on, and you are navigating back, then you get the original MyPage and so see the same value in the TextBox.
Now lets consider if we are using MVVM style views bound to ViewModels.
In MyPage.xaml
<Page ...>
<TextBox Text="{Binding MyData}"/>
</Page>
In DataViewModel.cs
public class DataViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
private string myData;
public string MyData
{
get { return myData;}
set { ... }
//Normal implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged etc for MVVM
}
If you are navigating to a new Page() which is bound to the same ViewModel then both Pages will always be in sync and show the same data.
If navigating to the ViewModel and relying on DataTemplates to create a view, then you have still have two views but both sync from the same ViewModel.
If you use the history and navigate back, you get the original MyPage so see the original data again.

Answer 2

The Frame class has a property called BackStack which retains the back navigation history for a Frame. This property is available to you regardless of the NavigationUIVisibility setting.

Answer 3

Use PageFunction instead, which helps out you to navigate very backward retaining values for that pages..
Page1.xaml:
<PageFunction
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:sys="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"
x:Class="XYZ"
x:TypeArguments="sys:String"
Title="page1">
<TextBox x:Name="textbox"/>
<Button x:Name="button" Click="button_clicked"/>
</PageFunction>
private void button_clicked(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
Page2 page2 = new Page2();
page2.Return += page2_Return;
this.NavigationService.Navigate(page2);
}
void page2_Return(object sender, ReturnEventArgs<String> e)
{
OnReturn(new ReturnEventArgs<String>(null));
}
Page2.Xaml:
<PageFunction
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:sys="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"
x:Class="PQR"
x:TypeArguments="sys:String"
Title="page2">
...
</PageFunction>
void BackButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
OnReturn(new ReturnEventArgs<String>(null));
}