zz - reprint of "How do I implement a data bound dialog box?"

the original post of this article is available here: http://bea.stollnitz.com/blog/?p=15 

 this post I will show you how to implement a dialog box using data binding. While this may seem like a straightforward task at first glance, when using data binding it can be tricky to get the “OK” button of a dialog to commit the user’s changes and the “Cancel” button to discard them.

One possible approach is to allow the bindings to update the data source as the user is typing information into the dialog box, then undo the work done by the bindings if the user happens to press the “Cancel” button. I don’t like the “Cancel” scenario of this approach because the data source acquires values that are only kept temporarily. Besides, it requires additional logic in the application to remember the data when the dialog box opens and to revert back to that data if the user presses “Cancel”. This is a lot of work and quite confusing. Fortunately, there is an easier way to get the job done – by changing the value of UpdateSourceTrigger in your Bindings.

The main Window in this sample has a Button that launches the dialog box, and Labels that show the contents of the data source. When this app is loaded the Labels are empty. When the user opens the dialog box, enters data in the TextBoxes and presses OK, the Labels in the main Window display the data just entered. If the user presses Cancel instead, the Labels should remain empty.

    <Button Click="ShowDialog" Width="100" Height="30">Show Dialog</Button>
    <Label Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="1" Name="Name" Margin="5" Content="{Binding Source={StaticResource source}, Path=Name}"/>
    <Label Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Name="Comment" Margin="5" Content="{Binding Source={StaticResource source}, Path=Comment}"/>
    
    private void ShowDialog(object sender, RoutedEventArgs args)
    {
        Dialog1 dialog = new Dialog1();
        dialog.Owner = this;
        dialog.ShowDialog();
    }

The dialog box contains TextBoxes data bound to the same data as the Labels and OK/Cancel Buttons. This is the markup that goes in the dialog box:

    <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="1" Name="Name" Margin="5" Text="{Binding Source={StaticResource source}, Path=Name, UpdateSourceTrigger=Explicit}"/>
    <TextBox Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Name="Comment" Margin="5" Text="{Binding Source={StaticResource source}, Path=Comment, UpdateSourceTrigger=Explicit}"/>
    <Button Click="OKHandler" IsDefault="true" Margin="5">OK</Button>
    <Button IsCancel="true" Margin="5">Cancel</Button>

The Binding object allows us to specify how to trigger updates to the data source through its UpdateSourceTrigger property. The default update trigger for the TextBox’s Text DP is “LostFocus”, which means that the data the user types is updated to the source when the TextBox loses focus. This is not what we want for this scenario though; we want the data to be updated only when the user presses the “OK” button. By changing the update trigger to “Explicit”, the data will not be updated to the source until we explicitly call the “UpdateSource()” method on the BindingExpression, which we can do in the handler for the “OK” button:

    private void OKHandler(object sender, RoutedEventArgs args)
    {
        BindingExpression bindingExpressionName = BindingOperations.GetBindingExpression(Name, TextBox.TextProperty);
        bindingExpressionName.UpdateSource();
        BindingExpression bindingExpressionComment = BindingOperations.GetBindingExpression(Comment, TextBox.TextProperty);
        bindingExpressionComment.UpdateSource();
        this.DialogResult = true;
    }

The logic for the “OK” button is simple, but the “Cancel” is even simpler. Because we never allowed the values typed to update to the source, all we have to do is close the Window. This can be done by simply setting IsCancel=true on the Cancel button, no event handler necessary.

Here is a screen shot of the completed sample:

Here you can find the VS project with this sample code. This works with November CTP WPF bits.

Update: You can also download this project with .NET 3.5 bits.