GridViewColumn DisplayMemberBinding vs CellTemplate

GridViewColumn has 2 different ways how one can specify the content of a cell. One can use the DisplayMemberBinding or also a CellTemplate. DisplayMemberBinding is used when you just want to show some text inside your GridViewColumn. You can use this property as follows

<ListView>
    <ListView.View>
         <GridView>
             <GridViewColumn DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Name}"
                                    Header="Name"/>
         </GridView>
    </ListView.View>
</ListView>

So basically all you have to do is specify a binding to the property of the object being bound. In reality the DisplayMemberBinding will create a TextBlock and bind the Text property of the TextBlock to the binding that you specify. Yet if you need more than just text in a TextBlock then DisplayMemberBinding is not what you should be looking for. For such scenario one should use the CellTemplate.

The CellTemplate property of the GridViewColumn allows you to enter a DataTemplate where you can put in whatever you like as controls to be rendered by the GridView. Let me give you an example of how one can use the CellTemplate to do something more than Text

<ListView>
    <ListView.View>
        <GridView>
            <GridViewColumn Header="Image">
                <GridViewColumn.CellTemplate>
                    <DataTemplate>
                        <Image Source="{Binding Image}"/>
                    </DataTemplate>
                </GridViewColumn.CellTemplate>
            </GridViewColumn>
        </GridView>
    </ListView.View>
</ListView>

So in the above example the ListView is now rendering an image where the source of the image is set via a binding to a property of the object being bound to. This gives you much more flexibility in terms of what you can do inside a Cell. For even more advanced scenarios where you have to decide how to render the cell according to the object being bound you can also use the CellTemplateSelector.

Final and most important point about these 2 properties…
DO NOT USE THEM TOGETHER!

If you set the DisplayMemberBinding it is useless to set the CellTemplate because the GridView will only use the DisplayMemberBinding and ignore the CellTemplate. So always make sure that you only set one of these properties and not both at the same time otherwise you will not get the results that you were hoping for.

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