I have a bunch of combos that all share the same available choices. These choices are provided in a collection exposed from my ViewModel. All fine and dandy.
I now want these choices sorted, so I decided to expose an ICollectionView
from my ViewModel instead of my usual ReadonlyObservableCollection<T>
, and sort the collection view in my ViewModel.
class EditStuffViewModel : ViewModelBase
{
public EditStuffViewModel (ObservableCollection<Choice> choices)
{
Choices = new CollectionViewSource() { Source = choices }.View;
Choices.SortDescriptions.Add(new SortDescription("Name", ListSortDirection.Ascending));
}
public ICollectionView Choices
{
get;
private set;
}
//snip other properties
}
This all works fine except that now all my combos now sync their selection.
This is not what I want. I want the choices to be shared, but selections to be to their normal bindings. I think I understand that my CollectionView is tracking selection, but I thought this was behaviour was opt in for each control.
I have tried explicitly setting IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="False"
on my combos which successfully decouples them, but then my bound SelectedItem
is never selected in the combo (the ViewModel's bound getter is called but the result is never selected). Selecting an item does seem to update my ViewModel's setter correctly.
I'm obviously missing something fundamental to how CollectionView is supposed to work. Can anyone enlighten me?
EDIT: My bad, this DOES work with IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="False"
. See my answer for details.
Cheers.
I'm very sorry for wasting everyone's time, but setting
IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="False"
does work. I had also added a filter along with the sort, and the default selected values were not in the filtered list of items. Oops.As for WHY I needed to explicitly turn IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem off when I never normally do on standard collections, light is shed on MSDN
So in other words, if you use a
CollectionView
explicitly rather than using the default view on a normal collection, you get selection sync.I havn't touched WPF in a while but I think that you need a different instances of
CollectionViewSource
for each combobox for the selected item to be maintained.I think this is because the
SelectedItem
property is being bound to theCollectionViewSource
object's selected item state property (I'm guessing that theView
object has it) and the ComboBoxes all share the same source instance, thus their selected item are now synced.So, just use different instances of
CollectionViewSource
for each of your ComboBoxes. You can still share the same source choices. You just need different VMs since your ComboBoxes should behave separately from each other.Something like this (untested):
Then change your ComboBoxes binding to bind to an element of
ChoiceViews
instead.