WPF Bind a combobox to an enumeration

-
I've often found myself needing to bind a combo box to an enumeration I've created. You can do this in WPF but it's a bit complicated. You end up needing to create a static resource. I had mine in a user control. First the enumeration I was using: 

 namespace XmlCoderBI.Enums  
 {  
   /// <summary>  
   /// An enumeration that represents the type of conversion we're doing  
   /// </summary>  
   public enum ConversionType  
   {  
     /// <summary>  
     /// The binary  
     /// </summary>  
     [Description( "Binary" )]  
     Binary = 0,  
     /// <summary>  
     /// The base64  
     /// </summary>  
     [Description( "Binary" )]  
     Base64 = 1,  
     /// <summary>  
     /// The hexadecimal  
     /// </summary>  
     [Description( "Hexadecimal" )]  
     Hexadecimal = 2,  
     /// <summary>  
     /// The UTF-8  
     /// </summary>  
     [Description( "Hexadecimal" )]  
     UTF8 = 3,  
     /// <summary>  
     /// The UTF-16  
     /// </summary>  
     [Description( "Hexadecimal" )]  
     UTF16 = 4  
   }  
 }


This is just an ordinary enum. Now you need to add this to your XAML references: 

xmlns:System="clr-namespace:System;assembly=mscorlib"
xmlns:enums="clr-namespace:XmlCoderBI.Enums;assembly=XmlCoderBI"

The first line adds a reference to the mscorlib library which lets us use Enums. The second is the reference to the library where you have your enumeration stored. Now to create the static resource and bind it to our combbox, I used mine in a user control, but this can go in any place you need it. 

 <Usercontrol.Resources>  
     <objectdataprovider methodname="GetValues" objecttype="{x:Type System:Enum}"
     x:key="dataFromEnumImport">  
     <objectdataprovider .methodparameters="">  
         <x:type typename="enums:ConversionType">  
       </x:type></objectdataprovider>  
     </objectdataprovider></usercontrol>  
</UserControl.Resources>

<combobox itemssource="{Binding Source={StaticResource dataFromEnumImport}}"
 selecteditem="{Binding ImportFileType}" width="100" />

You can see it's binding the ItemSource to our enum using the key we define in the static resource. The SelectedItem is also bound to a property I have defined in my DataContext. I use this for easy tracking of the selected value but you don't have to bind the SelectedItem.

Comments

Katie said…
Pretty cool. Thanks.
Friday, April 21, 2017 8:40:00 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

String.Replace vs Regex.Replace

-
Image
I recently ran into a situation where I had to do some string manipulation. I had to replace some bad text with valid text. All this had to do with creating valid xml element names. So we had to string white space and some other invalid characters and replace them with valid xml element formatting. To do this we ended up using the Regex.Replace static method. Simply because there was some complexity involved that would have entailed using more then 1 String.Replace call when we can do it all with one regular expression. This caused some discussion about how heavy the regex class is and when to use it. I decided to do some testing and these are my results. First the code static void Main( string[] args ) { // this is our test value string testValue = "This is a test string"; int count; // run the regex replace DateTime regexStart = DateTime.Now; for( count = 0; count < 10000000; count++ ) { string newValue = Regex.Replace( testValue, ...
Read more

C# Producer Consumer using Rabbit MQ

-
So I've been learning about the different message queuing systems and discovered rabbit MQ, an open source and very popular message queuing system. I've created a very basic producer/consumer system that sends a message to a rabbit MQ queue. Producer/Consumer is pretty simple, you have two systems a producer that writes to a queue and a consumer that reads from a queue. This is desirable because it splits responsibility and allows for scalability. The code below is going to assume you have a rabbit MQ instance installed on your local machine. You can get rabbit MQ here:  https://www.rabbitmq.com/ Now the code is broken down into 3 parts, the main program, the producer, and the consumer. This is a basic example so its using old school threading rather than the new async/await .net prefers. But this is just to show how to use rabbit MQ in C# and to demonstrate a producer/consumer example. You will need to make sure your project has the rabbit MQ client nuget package installed...
Read more

C# Form Application in Kiosk Mode/Fullscreen

-
Sometimes you need to have a C# windows form application run in full screen mode.  Like you see on a kiosk at a mall or some stand alone machine.  It's fairly easy you just need to set some of the properties on the Form either in it's OnLoad method or directly in the designer. In the OnLoad method of the main Form set these values, or again set them directly in the designer. this.MaximizeBox = false; this.TopMost = true; this.FormBorderStyle = System.Windows.Forms.FormBorderStyle.None; this.WindowState = System.Windows.Forms.FormWindowState.Maximized;
Read more