I am currently getting to grips with the Infragistics WPF controls that they call NetAdvantage for WPF. So far I have found them easy to use, but the documentation of examples is very lax. Do not mistake me, these components are fantastic and do way more work for me than I would care to do myself, but if you Google a particular piece of their API invariable you will get pure documentation and no samples. If you are lucky someone has asked a specific question about it and you can skim their answers, but the likely hood of finding an answer to your question is negligible in my experience.
I still love the components, it just makes it a little more difficult to develop with them…
An example would maybe get us all on the same page:
I am using their Ribbon components in one of my applications and wanted to dynamically generate (using a binding) the menu options.
1: <igRibbon:XamRibbon.ApplicationMenu>
2:
3: <igRibbon:ApplicationMenu>
4: <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxTeamServerMenuTool" Caption="Team Server" ItemsSource="{Binding AvailableServers}"
ItemTemplate="{DynamicResource tAvailableServers}" ButtonType="DropDown"
LargeImage="\Resources\Images\TeamServerSelectIcon.png">
5: </igRibbon:MenuTool>
6: <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxTeamProjectMenuTool" Caption="Team Project" ItemsSource="{Binding AvailableProjects}"
ButtonType="DropDown" SmallImage="\Resources\Images\TeamProjectSelectIcon.png">
7: </igRibbon:MenuTool>
8: <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxHeatConnectionMenuTool" Caption="Heat Server" ButtonType="DropDown">
9: </igRibbon:MenuTool>
10: <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxHeatApplicationMenuTool" Caption="Heat App" ButtonType="DropDown" >
11: </igRibbon:MenuTool>
12: <!-- Place a button in the footer of the ApplicationMenu that allows the user to quit the application. -->
13: <igRibbon:ApplicationMenu.FooterToolbar>
14: <igRibbon:ApplicationMenuFooterToolbar>
15: <igRibbon:ButtonTool Caption="Settings" Command="local:Commands.ClearSettingsCommand" />
16: <igRibbon:ButtonTool Caption="Exit" />
17: </igRibbon:ApplicationMenuFooterToolbar>
18: </igRibbon:ApplicationMenu.FooterToolbar>
19: </igRibbon:ApplicationMenu>
20: </igRibbon:XamRibbon.ApplicationMenu>
As you can see in line 4 there is a binding that does indeed populate the list. But I am having trouble getting the template to take. I want the Items listed as a set of radio buttons (kinda) and so I added a Template:
1: <DataTemplate x:Key="tAvailableServers" DataType="{x:Type tfs:TeamFoundationServer}">
2: <igRibbon:RadioButtonTool
3: Caption="{Binding Name}"
4: Tag="{Binding}"
5: LargeImage="\Resources\Images\TeamServerSelectIcon.png"
6: igRibbon:MenuToolBase.MenuItemDescription="{Binding Url.ToString}"/>
7: </DataTemplate>
This should have displayed what I wanted, but it seams to be ignored.
To allow this to work, all I needed to do was remove the x:Key from the template. But why can't I specify a template by name. What if I wanted to have two templates and choose which one was displayed…