I’ve been spending the past several days fighting with the ComboBox in an attempt to make it so something very simple: Wrap text inside the combo box. I’ve finally figured it out, so I thought I’d share.

OK, first of all, make sure that your ComboBox is hooked up to something, even if that something is some random RSS feed. I have a post that can help you with that over here. Bind your comboBox to the “Items” part of the New York Times RSS feed.

You need to do this because, if you do not, you will have to set the same data template to every single ComboBoxItem that you add to the ComboBox. And that’s just no fun.

Starting out, your ComboBox should look something like this:

Right click on your ComboBox and select “Edit Other Templates -> Edit Generated Items (ItemTemplate)-> Create Empty…” Give your new data template a name and Blend will take you into the Data Template design.

Continue reading ‘How Do I Wrap Text (or Add TextEllipsis) In The ComboBox?’ »

OK, it’s really late and I want to get this done, so we’re going to go through the easy way, which will require some XAML, but I’ll try to keep it as Blend-y as possible.

So you have a column header and you want the text inside to wrap when the header space gets too short for the content. Your header probably looks something like this:

First, go to wherever your resources are being held and type the following in:

<Style x:Key=”CustomHeaderStyle“ TargetType=”{x:Type GridViewColumnHeader}“>
</Style>

Continue reading ‘How Do I Wrap Text in a ListView Header?’ »

Please Read: Strangely, when you do a Google search for “wpf” and “listview”, this is one of the top links. This is odd because this particular post is kind of an advanced tutorial. If you’re looking for more general information on styling the wpf listview, check out this post. It is probably much closer to what you’re looking for.

This is a bit of an advanced tutorial. I’m putting it up because I just figured out how to do it and I want to share. You can also download the project files for this tutorial (in zip format… requires .Net 3.5).

Recently, I received from my user experience designers a wireframe that looked something like this:

As you can see, there are embedded categories (categories within categories) here. I considered many solutions (hacks), but I found that a deeper understanding of the ListView and how it works would allow me to resolve this issue very simply (and without even touching the code behind). Continue reading ‘Embedded ListView Columns (Columns Within Columns)’ »

I had a question from a reader in an earlier post on how to resize the ListView Gripper (seen below) so I wanted to address that in this quick post.

 Styling the gripper is actually pretty easy. First, take a look at my Styling the ListView Column Header post. Follow that along until you get to the template for the ColumnHeader (by the fifth image down).

You should have something that looks like this:

Now we’re going to ignore everything here except that little part at the bottom the “PART_HeaderGripper”

Continue reading ‘How do I style the ListView column gripper (also known as a “splitter” or a “seperator”)’ »

ListView header Styling is one of the most difficult styling pieces I’ve had to deal with. Part of this is because it is just another part of the seemingly endlessly complex listview. The other part is just because of the way the styling for the listview is put together in WPF.

In this post, we’re going to change the default color of the header (background and foreground) and make the headers look more like bubbles. Why? Because we can! (Everytime I say that, somewhere a usability expert loses a little bit of their soul.)

Take note that anything done in this will affect the whole header. If you’re looking to do something to one individual column in the header, you need to go to this post on ColumnHeaders (coming soon). See the bottom of this post for more details.

As a point of note, the easy way in this particular case involves going directly into the XAML and the hard way involves going through the steps in Blend. The easy way is posted at the bottom.

Now for the hard way. First, go to your listview, right click on it and go to:

Edit Control Parts (Template) -> Edit a Copy…

Continue reading ‘Styling the ListView Column Header’ »

So… you’ve got your listview and you want your items to look a certain way. In this post, we’ll look at changing as many things as we can inside the ListView ItemContainerStyle.

 First things first… getting to the ItemContainerStyle using Blend. With the ListView selected, go to the top menu and click:

 Edit Other Styles -> Edit ItemContainerStyle -> Create Empty…

Name your Style and you get tossed into Style editing. Here, you can do all sorts of great things, like… um… changing the background or something.

Continue reading ‘Styling ListView Items Using Blend’ »

So the items in your ListView column look like this:

And you want them to look like this:

If you’re trying to center something within a ListView column, it’s actually pretty simple.

Continue reading ‘How Do I Center Something In My ListView Column?’ »

In response to the questions:

How do I make it so that, instead of cutting off the text in my column when I shorten it, my text displays ellipsis?

and

How do I make it so that my text wraps when I shorten my columns?

I’ll deal with the first one first and the second one… second.

That sounded better in my head than it looks on the screen.

With the first question… when a column is shortened, this is what normally happens:

And, instead, we want this to happen: 

Continue reading ‘Ellipsis and TextWrapping in a ListView Column’ »

So you’ve got a listview and you want the columns (not the rows) to look a certain way. (If you are in any way confused, head over here.)

In this post, we’re going to build a template for a column and style that template so the data in that column is all styled the same way, but different from the data in the rest of the list view. Kind of like this:

If you’re following from the RSS Feed post: go to the listview in the main composition and right click on your listivew and go to “Edit Other Templates -> Edit Generated Item (ItemTemplate) -> Edit a Copy…”

Not following from the RSS Feed post: go to the listview in your composition, right click on your listview and co to “Edit Other Templates -> Edit Generated Item (ItemTempalte) -> Create Empty…”

 Name it whatever you like (I named mine “TitleTemplate”) and hit OK.

Continue reading ‘Styling A ListView Column Using Blend’ »

When I’m doing the initial design for a project (while the developers are working on silly things like data validation and security), I often find myself in need of data so that I can see my project in action. The developers, of course, have no interest in conjuring up test data at that phase in the project, so I started using RSS feeds as data sources for my initial designs.

Not all RSS feeds are equal in the eyes of Blend. I use one of the New York Times RSS feeds, which always work flawlessly.

So we’re looking at the listview/listbox/whatever in our project. Right click on it (in the composition or in the Objects and Timeline pane, it doesn’t matter) and select the “Bind ItemsSource to Data”.

Continue reading ‘How do I connect an RSS Feed to my ListView/ListBox/Whatever?’ »