I'm very new to XAML. To utilize MVC architecture and the Command Pattern while taking advantage of XAML, I have started binding static ICommands to Buttons. I'm working on a fairly large project with over a hundred buttons. My questions are: are there different approaches for binding commands to buttons to avoid static objects. With regards to C#, WPF, and XAML, are statics commonly used? I'm sure someone has already worked on a project using MVC, Command Pattern, and XAML, what was your approach?
I should have probably edited this sooner, but while working on the project, I've realized how much I didn't know about c#, WPF, and XAML when I asked this question. Apparently, in WPF, instance properties make it convenient binding methods and data members to controls.
As far as MVC / MVVM are concerned, I guess I was hesitant to expose my model to VM before I even know what it is.
I think you mean the MVVM pattern as it applies to WPF. That is Model View ViewModel
Model = used to construct the form model for the data being manipulated
View = Presentation (usually a main form and many user control forms)
ViewModel = code container for presenter (classes that contain the code)
Generally your binding take the place of ICommand methods that implement a RelayCommand from a base. There is a lot to learn before implementing the MVVM model, I would suggest reading Josh Smith's article and downloading his example to get started on learning it:
There are special rules and principles to learn and this example will go through a lot of it.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx
I would also think it would be wise to learn how WPF performs bindings a little bit. There are many special setups you can do with bindings to help with performing operations at different events and other places. I do not even know all the bindings by heart but I know the more you learn them the more time you save in the end in your XAML coding as you can reuse, event trigger, inherit and do many things with bindings to make your applications more powerful than static creation.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752347.aspx
Related
I think I have a pretty good understanding of the MVVM design model, however I have a quarm with it in regards to WPF, Command bindings and how we are meant to use them.
To bind commands to the XAML directly we are meant to implement the ICommand interface within the ViewModel. Now, the ICommand interface is part of the PresentationCore.DLL, which, correct me if im wrong is part of WPF not the base .NET framework.
Isnt the whole point of the ViewModel and Model that it should be totally UI independant? For example, if I implement ICommand in my ViewModel and use it as a data context in order to bind commands from the XAML, isnt my ViewModel then dependant on the WPF frame work (in particular the PresentationCore.Dll).
What I mean is, if I was to go and try to use my Models and ViewModels in lets say a Windows Forms environment, I would have to reference the PresentationCore.DLL even though I shouldnt need it because im using Windows Forms not the WPF framework.
This seems a bit odd to me, am I missing something here? Is there another way I should be doing it to keep my Model and ViewModel totally UI and UI Framework independant, but still be able to utilise the Command binding in XAML?
Thanks in advance!
I also had this kind of problem but not in wpf but in POCO classes. What i did was I created two partial classes in two different assemblies. Like you create one partial class which is not presentationcore.dll dependent in your VM project and create its partial class in another assembly(say WPFVM) which implements ICommand stuff. Now for Winforms stuff add only VM project reference to View project and for WPF stuff add references of both VM and WPFVM to the View project. I hope this will help.
The point of MVVM is to have the view just be a view, and nothing more. Putting ICommands into the view model helps this as it pulls the code away from the view. Where you will run into problems is if you have to access something on the view that is not a dependency property, which means you can not bind to it.
In my opinion MVVM is very popular with the WPF, Silverlight because it naturally fits into it. The data binding concept in the XAML allows the Views & ViewModels to be bridged using a single property which is the DataContext. As no longer your logic is tied to controls, you get better testability, design-code separation and maintainability. You may be able to implement the MVVM pattern in other places also, but in WPF and Silverlight, it fits so easily due to its data and command binding support. I have read somewhere that, Don't take patterns religiously. They were made to make your life simpler rather than giving you more problems while following it. For Winforms i think there are better patterns, If you are focusing in reusing the business logic, move them out of your ViewModels to seperate classes something like serviceproviders or serviceagents and share them between your Winforms and WPF apps.
This has changed in .NET 4.5 compare
.NET Framework 4.5
.NET Framework 4
I am currently working with the Microsoft MVVM template and find the lack of detailed examples frustrating. The included ContactBook example shows very little Command handling and the only other example I've found is from an MSDN Magazine article where the concepts are similar but uses a slightly different approach and still lack in any complexity. Are there any decent MVVM examples that at least show basic CRUD operations and dialog/content switching?
Everyone's suggestions were really useful and I will start compiling a list of good resources
Frameworks/Templates
WPF Model-View-ViewModel Toolkit
MVVM Light Toolkit
Prism
Caliburn
Cinch
Useful Articles
WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern
Data Validation in .NET 3.5
Using a ViewModel to Provide Meaningful Validation Error Messages
Action based ViewModel and Model validation
Dialogs
Command Bindings in MVVM
More than just MVC for WPF
MVVM + Mediator Example
Application
Screencasts
Jason Dolinger on Model-View-ViewModel
Additional Libraries
WPF Disciples' improved Mediator Pattern implementation(I highly recommend this for applications that have more complex navigation)
MVVM Light Toolkit Messenger
Unfortunately there is no one great MVVM example app that does everything, and there are a lot of different approaches to doing things. First, you might want to get familiar with one of the app frameworks out there (Prism is a decent choice), because they provide you with convenient tools like dependency injection, commanding, event aggregation, etc to easily try out different patterns that suit you.
The prism release:
http://www.codeplex.com/CompositeWPF
It includes a pretty decent example app (the stock trader) along with a lot of smaller examples and how to's. At the very least it's a good demonstration of several common sub-patterns people use to make MVVM actually work. They have examples for both CRUD and dialogs, I believe.
Prism isn't necessarily for every project, but it's a good thing to get familiar with.
CRUD:
This part is pretty easy, WPF two way bindings make it really easy to edit most data. The real trick is to provide a model that makes it easy to set up the UI. At the very least you want to make sure that your ViewModel (or business object) implements INotifyPropertyChanged to support binding and you can bind properties straight to UI controls, but you may also want to implement IDataErrorInfo for validation. Typically, if you use some sort of an ORM solution setting up CRUD is a snap.
This article demonstrates simple crud operations:
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/wpf/WPFDataBindingWithLINQ.aspx
It is built on LinqToSql, but that is irrelevant to the example - all that is important is that your business objects implement INotifyPropertyChanged (which classes generated by LinqToSql do). MVVM is not the point of that example, but I don't think it matters in this case.
This article demonstrates data validation
http://blogs.msdn.com/wpfsdk/archive/2007/10/02/data-validation-in-3-5.aspx
Again, most ORM solutions generate classes that already implement IDataErrorInfo and typically provide a mechanism to make it easy to add custom validation rules.
Most of the time you can take an object(model) created by some ORM and wrap it in a ViewModel that holds it and commands for save/delete - and you're ready to bind UI straight to the model's properties.
The view would look like something like this (ViewModel has a property Item that holds the model, like a class created in the ORM):
<StackPanel>
<StackPanel DataContext=Item>
<TextBox Text="{Binding FirstName, Mode=TwoWay, ValidatesOnDataErrors=True}" />
<TextBox Text="{Binding LastName, Mode=TwoWay, ValidatesOnDataErrors=True}" />
</StackPanel>
<Button Command="{Binding SaveCommand}" />
<Button Command="{Binding CancelCommand}" />
</StackPanel>
Dialogs:
Dialogs and MVVM are a bit tricky. I prefer to use a flavor of the Mediator approach with dialogs, you can read a little more about it in this StackOverflow question:
WPF MVVM dialog example
My usual approach, which is not quite classic MVVM, can be summarized as follows:
A base class for a dialog ViewModel that exposes commands for commit and cancel actions, an event to lets the view know that a dialog is ready to be closed, and whatever else you will need in all of your dialogs.
A generic view for your dialog - this can be a window, or a custom "modal" overlay type control. At its heart it is a content presenter that we dump the viewmodel into, and it handles the wiring for closing the window - for example on data context change you can check if the new ViewModel is inherited from your base class, and if it is, subscribe to the relevant close event (the handler will assign the dialog result). If you provide alternative universal close functionality (the X button, for instance), you should make sure to run the relevant close command on the ViewModel as well.
Somewhere you need to provide data templates for your ViewModels, they can be very simple especially since you probably have a view for each dialog encapsulated in a separate control. The default data template for a ViewModel would then look something like this:
<DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type vmodels:AddressEditViewModel}">
<views:AddressEditView DataContext="{Binding}" />
</DataTemplate>
The dialog view needs to have access to these, because otherwise it won't know how to show the ViewModel, aside from the shared dialog UI its contents are basically this:
<ContentControl Content="{Binding}" />
The implicit data template will map the view to the model, but who launches it?
This is the not-so-mvvm part. One way to do it is to use a global event. What I think is a better thing to do is to use an event aggregator type setup, provided through dependency injection - this way the event is global to a container, not the whole app. Prism uses the unity framework for container semantics and dependency injection, and overall I like Unity quite a bit.
Usually, it makes sense for the root window to subscribe to this event - it can open the dialog and set its data context to the ViewModel that gets passed in with a raised event.
Setting this up in this way lets ViewModels ask the application to open a dialog and respond to user actions there without knowing anything about the UI so for the most part the MVVM-ness remains complete.
There are times, however, where the UI has to raise the dialogs, which can make things a bit trickier. Consider for example, if the dialog position depends on the location of the button that opens it. In this case you need to have some UI specific info when you request a dialog open. I generally create a separate class that holds a ViewModel and some relevant UI info. Unfortunately some coupling seems unavoidable there.
Pseudo code of a button handler that raises a dialog which needs element position data:
ButtonClickHandler(sender, args){
var vm = DataContext as ISomeDialogProvider; // check for null
var ui_vm = new ViewModelContainer();
// assign margin, width, or anything else that your custom dialog might require
...
ui_vm.ViewModel = vm.SomeDialogViewModel; // or .GetSomeDialogViewModel()
// raise the dialog show event
}
The dialog view will bind to position data, and pass the contained ViewModel to the inner ContentControl. The ViewModel itself still doesn't know anything about the UI.
In general I don't make use of the DialogResult return property of the ShowDialog() method or expect the thread to block until the dialog is closed. A non-standard modal dialog doesn't always work like that, and in a composite environment you often don't really want an event handler to block like that anyhow. I prefer to let the ViewModels deal with this - the creator of a ViewModel can subscribe to its relevant events, set commit/cancel methods, etc, so there is no need to rely on this UI mechanism.
So instead of this flow:
// in code behind
var result = somedialog.ShowDialog();
if (result == ...
I use:
// in view model
var vm = new SomeDialogViewModel(); // child view model
vm.CommitAction = delegate { this.DoSomething(vm); } // what happens on commit
vm.CancelAction = delegate { this.DoNothing(vm); } // what happens on cancel/close (optional)
// raise dialog request event on the container
I prefer it this way because most of my dialogs are non-blocking pseudo-modal controls and doing it this way seems more straightforward than working around it. Easy to unit test as well.
Jason Dolinger made a good screencast of MVVM. Like Egor mentioned there is no one good example. They are all over. Most are good MVVM examples, but not when you get into complex issues. Everyone has their own way. Laurent Bugnion has a good way to communicate between viewmodels as well. http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2009/09/27/mvvm-light-toolkit-messenger-v2-beta.aspx Cinch is also a good example. Paul Stovel has a good post that explains a lot too with his Magellan framework.
Have you looked at Caliburn? The ContactManager sample has a lot of good stuff in it. The generic WPF samples also provide a good overview of commands. The documentation is fairly good and the forums are active. Recommended!
Found this one useful. Has code too.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx
I have written a simple MVVM example from scratch on code project here is the link MVVM WPF step by step.
It starts from a simple 3 layer architecture and graduates you to use some framework like PRISM.
The sample project in the Cinch framework shows basic CRUD and navigation tools. It's a fairly good example of using MVVM, and includes a multi-part article explaining its usage and motivations.
I also shared in your frustration. I'm writing an application and I had these 3 requirements:
Extensible
WPF with MVVM
GPL compatible examples
All I found were bits and pieces, so I just started writing it the best I could. After I got into it a bit, I realized there might be other people (like yourself) who could use a reference application, so I refactored the generic stuff out into a WPF/MVVM application framework and released it under the LGPL. I named it SoapBox Core. If you go to the downloads page, you'll see it comes with a small demo application, and the source code for that demo application is also available for download. Hope you find that helpful. Also, email me at scott {at} soapboxautomation.com if you want more info.
EDIT: Also posted a CodeProject article explaining how it works.
Here I am adding link of a WPF(Inventory Management App) application which using MVVM architecture designed by me .
Its UI is awesome.
https://github.com/shivam01990/InventoryManagement
Even I shared the frustration until I took the matter into my hands. I started IncEditor.
IncEditor (http://inceditor.codeplex.com) is an editor that tries to introduce developers to WPF, MVVM & MEF. I started it and managed to get some functionality like 'theme' support. I am no expert in WPF or MVVM or MEF so I can't put a lot of functionality in it. I make a sincere request to you guys to make it better so that nutters like me can understand it better.
This question already has answers here:
Why use MVVM? [closed]
(13 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
Why we go for MVVM over MVC or MVP while dealing with WPF?
What extra benefit we get by using this?
Edit:
To be honest , today I had an interview and I have been asked this question. I answered like INotifyPropertyChanged , ICommand,IValue Convertor.. but he was not satisfied. Henceforth I have put up this question
Thanks in advance
I'll point you to a particularly useful video by Jason Dolinger.
Coming from a WinForms world, implementing any MVX style pattern seemed like more hassle than it was worth but after working with WPF for a couple of years now, I can honestly say that I wouldn't consider anything less. The whole paradigm is supported out-of-the-box.
First off, the key benefit is enabling true separation between the view and model. What that means in real terms is that if/when your model needs to change, it can without the view needing to and vice-versa.
Secondly, while your model may contain all the data you might need in your view, you may want to abstract that data in such a way that your model doesn't support. For example, say your model contains a date property. In the model it can exist solely as a DateTime object but your view might want to present it in a completely different way. Without the viewmodel you'd either have to duplicate the property in the model to support the view or modify the property which could seriously obfuscate the 'model'.
You can also use a viewmodel to aggregate parts of your model that exist in separate classes/libraries to facilitate a more fluent interface for the view to deal with. It's very unlikely that you'll want to work with data in your code in the same way that a user will want to or will want that data presented to them.
On top of that, you get support for automatic two-way data binding between the view and viewmodel.
There really is a whole bunch of extra stuff that I could bang on about but Jason say's it far better that I could so my advice is watch the video. After a few days of working like this, you'll wonder how you ever got by without it.
Good luck.
These are mine specific to MVVM
Increases the "Blendability" of your views (ability to use Expression Blend to design views). This enables a separation of responsibilities on teams that are lucky enough to have a designer and a programmer... each can work independent of the other.
"Lookless" view logic. Views are agnostic from the code that runs behind them, enabling the same view logic to be reused across multiple views or have a view easily retooled or replaced. Seperates concerns between "behavior" and "style".
No duplicated code to update views. In code-behind you will see a lot of calls to "myLabel.Text = newValue" sprinkled everywhere. With MVVM you can be assured the view is updated appropriately just by setting the underlying property and all view side-effects thereof.
Testability. Since your logic is completely agnostic of your view (no "myLabel.Text" references), unit testing is made easy. You can test the behavior of a ViewModel without involving its view. This also enabled test-driven development of view behavior, which is almost impossible using code-behind.
The other two patterns are really sort of separate in terms of the concerns they address. You can use MVVM with MVP and MVC (most good samples out there do some form of this).
In fact, MVP (w/ a Passive View, rather than a Supervising Controller) is really just a variant of MVVM, in my opinion.
WPF has better databinding than any other UI framework, which MVVM would be unruly without
MVVM provides unit testability and excellent view-agnosticism, which make it a good thing to use
Baked in support for ICommand and INotifyPropertyChanged are the two biggest benefits. Using MVVM makes it really easy to wire up the commands and plug data into the WPF UI. Things just work.
I personnaly see MVVM not as a benefit, but as an obligation for those who want to use WPF cool features.
WPF is very very heavily built with data binding at the core, to enable separation of UI from Model. But the way data binding is technically done in WPF is somewhat special, as it's tied to classes like:
DependencyProperty
INotifyPropertyChanged
ObservableCollection
Because of this you just can't really write a model the way you want using standard .NET technology. For example, the WPF TreeView is almost impossible to use w/o using data binding and templates. You just can't populate it simply like you would from a generic model in Winforms for example. It must be bound to a hierarchical model using ObservableCollection to represent a node's children.
So let's say V represents the XAML code and it's code-behind counterpart (so it's tied to WPF as a technology), and let's say M represents your model (so it's not tied to WPF UI technology in anyway).
Well, you'll never have this working properly under WPF with only these V & M.
You must add something between the two. Something that's WPF-compatible and understands your model. Something that speaks DependencyProperty, ObservableCollection and INotifyPropertyChanged. That's what's called VM.
As a side note, an alternative to MVVM is to build a V & M (w/o VM plumbing) combination with M being WPF-compatible but still with a reasonable UI independency. Historically, ObservableCollection was in the WindowsBase.dll assembly (that was shipped with WPF), so it really looked weird to bind a generic model to something tied to a UI technology. It's been moved back to System.dll since. Even then, it's sometimes hard to keep a pure VM model w/o tweaking the M specifically for WPF...
The ability of XAML code to databind, as well as the existance of triggers will break the MVP and MVC Patterns.
I just converted all my settings from AppSettings to ConfigurationSections. It definitely cleaned things up, but I'm having difficulties with the preferences window. I want to use bindings in my WPF window.
Should I store each of the ConfigurationSections in a dependency property and bind to the ConfigurationSection's properties?
Should I use ObjectDataProvider's that calls the ConfigurationManager.GetSection?
Is there another way I can do this?
Off-topic: I find the bindings in WPF to be really powerful, but it's sometimes a bit confusing or difficult to create the bindings. I wish there was better documentation for XAML.
You don't need to do anything special - you can databind to types with plain old properties. All the stuff about dependency properties are only for WPF controls themselves. When it comes to the model against which you bind, there are no particular constraints. You can bind to Plain Old C# Objects (POCOs), although implementing INotifyPropertyChanged is an advantage.
However, instead of binding directly to your Domain objects (it sounds like your ConfigurationSections fit that role), it is often a good idea to explicitly create a ViewModel that deals with view-specific responsibilities while encapsulating the real Domain objects.
Josh Smith's article Patterns: WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern is an excellent introduction to proper databinding in WPF.
Well this question relates to MVVM pattern and i could good and fast answers on this forum so I thought to ask and clear the confusions i had about the pattern.
I am quite new to MVVM approach. I appreciate the pattern and understand the principals behind it. Maybe I have not worked that much with the pattern that’s why there are a few confusions.
If there is a scenario in which I want to load few parts of my WPF page dynamically with XAML and still want to be compliant with MVVM approach.
The confusion is:
Where the logic of loading a view dynamically with XAML reside.
Whether I should have a single ViewModel for my WPF page or each seperate part have its own viewmodel with interactions with other viewmodel classes.
What if I had to build control tree displayed on the GUI using C# code in the codebehind itself.
For the controls created using code should I do the commandbindings in the codebehind of the view itself.
Where the logic for loading goes is something not really addressed by the pattern itself. There's an interesting blog post about this by Ward Bell. There's any number of ways to skin this cat, and they're all compatible with MVVM. Not really the answer you're looking for, I know, but it's honest :). Check out Ward's blog post... you'll get a much more in depth discussion of this topic.
As for whether or not to have a single VM for the page, or one for each control, that just depends. Generally, I have one for the page. If there's some portion that reusable elsewhere, I break it out into a user control with it's own VM, which means we have a VM within a VM. I don't agree with rockeye on this one. There isn't a one-to-one relationship between V-VM-M. You're Models are designed according to business needs, with NO regard to presentation at all. You're ViewModels are designed according to your presentation needs, and may encapsulate more than one Model. In fact, it's very common for them to encapsulate many models.
Like rockeye, I don't understand your last question.
I am also quite new to mvvm, but i will try to answer :
Where the logic of loading a view dynamically with XAML reside
If you mean "how can i show the view associated with my business object?", IMHO, you don't have to care about this. Usually, your VMs have corresponding views. With dataTemplate, you use only VM in the code but Views are displayed automatically.
2 Whether i should have a single ViewModel for my WPF page or each seperate part have its own viewmodel with interactions with other viewmodel classes
It seems you have a top-bottom approach. I see the mvvm more as bottom-up : models (business objects) -> ViewModels -> Views. Every model should have its own ViewModel and view. So you can't have a whole WPF page in a viewModel unless you model represents a page.
3 What if i had to build control tree displayed on the GUI using C# code in the codebehind itself. For the controls created using code should i do the commandbindings in the codebehind of the view itself.
Don't understand. I think you may take a look at dataTemplate, it might be helpfull.