WPF Master Pages (kinda sorta)
I decided to build a simple project management application in my quest to wrap my head around WPF. So far I set up the database, got an Entity Framework model happily binding, and started writing CRUD “pages” (the TabItems of a TabControl as shown in the GUI shown).
These pages share much of the same presentation and logic and, after writing two of them, I knew I had to refactor them somehow. Some kind of “master page” would work well here. I will just define the entity-specific controls and the data calls for each page and the rest of the presentation and logic will live in non-repeated harmony in the master page.
Well, my first idea, subclassing a XAML-based UserControl turns out to be very tricky to get by the compiler and generally a bad idea.
These links provide some valid ways to implement master page type functionality in WPF:
- Code Project article by Karin Huber that explains the basic approach used in all of these links. Be sure to read the comments at the end for some subtle fixes.
- Slightly different approach with a great clear explanation by Brad Cunningham.
- Example of three different “subclassing” approaches by Rob Relyea.
I’ll share some code later once I am happy with my implementation. One issue is that you can’t bind between controls in different ContentControls (as noted in this comment), which I need for this application. I know there has to be a better way…