UpdateSourceTrigger PropertyChanged for Silverlight 4 Binding ?

Problem Definition

In Silverlight 4 there is no way out of the box to specify that a certain binding should update the source on PropertyChanged, the options for the UpdateSourceTrigger are LostFocus and Explicit.

These options are more or less what you really need for most scenarios, yet sometimes you want to have the ability to update the binding while a property is changing. A use case would be, you have a textbox and you want to apply some validations while the user is typing, maybe you enable a button if the text entered is correct or disable it if it is not correct.

Many times developers end up writing code behind in order to achieve this. Problem with this is that if you need it in multiple places you end up copying and pasting code for code behind. In this article I will show how one can workaround this problem by resorting to the mighty Attached Properties.

Using an Attached Property to workaround this problem

By using an attached property we can have the code to update the source on property changed. For this demo I will focus on how to make this work for a TextBox in Silverlight. In future posts I will show how you can have a generic way of dealing with this issue.

The attached property will give us the instance of the object the attached property is being applied to, with the reference of the object (in our case the TextBox) at hand we can hook to the TextChanged and update the binding. In order to update the binding you can use the GetBindingExpression method of the UI element. Then we can simple call the UpdateSource on the BindingExpression and viola the trick is done…

The Attached Property would look like this

using System.Windows;

using System.Windows.Controls;

namespace SilverlightUpdateSourceTrigger

{

    public class UpdateSourceTrigger

    {

        #region TextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger

        /// <summary>

        /// TextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger Attached Dependency Property

        /// </summary>

        public static readonly DependencyProperty TextChangeUpdateSourceTriggerProperty =

            DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("TextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger", typeof(bool), typeof(UpdateSourceTrigger),

                new PropertyMetadata((bool)false,

                    new PropertyChangedCallback(OnTextChangeUpdateSourceTriggerChanged)));

        /// <summary>

        /// Gets the TextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger property. This dependency property 

        /// indicates ....

        /// </summary>

        public static bool GetTextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger(DependencyObject d)

        {

            return (bool)d.GetValue(TextChangeUpdateSourceTriggerProperty);

        }

        /// <summary>

        /// Sets the TextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger property. This dependency property 

        /// indicates ....

        /// </summary>

        public static void SetTextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger(DependencyObject d, bool value)

        {

            d.SetValue(TextChangeUpdateSourceTriggerProperty, value);

        }

        /// <summary>

        /// Handles changes to the TextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger property.

        /// </summary>

        private static void OnTextChangeUpdateSourceTriggerChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)

        {

            TextBox textBox = d as TextBox;

            if (textBox == null)

                return;

            bool newTextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger = (bool)d.GetValue(TextChangeUpdateSourceTriggerProperty);

            if (newTextChangeUpdateSourceTrigger)

                textBox.TextChanged += OnTextChanged;

            else

                textBox.TextChanged -= OnTextChanged;

        }

        static void OnTextChanged(object sender, TextChangedEventArgs e)

        {

            TextBox textBox = sender as TextBox;

            var binding = textBox.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty);

            binding.UpdateSource();

        }

        #endregion

    }

}

Enjoy and Happy XMAS