Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2

Item Selection

User interfaces often display a list of items to a user in a control such as a ListBox and allow the user to select one of the items. Once he makes the selection, the user may be brought to another screen, another control may appear with detailed information about the selected item, or the selected item’s details may appear in a series of controls below the ListBox. Generally, this is a good design practice, as it is often impossible to effectively display all of the information about an item in a list-based control. For example, if an entity such as a Product has more than 50 properties, displaying all of those properties in a list-based control would be problematic and likely would not be very user-friendly. Though with Silverlight 2 and XAML, you can alleviate this somewhat by creating a DataTemplate that contains several rows of information within each row of the ListBox. However, even this solution has its limits.

One possible solution to this type of problem is to display a list of items that contains a summary of the items in a control such as a ListBox. Then when the user selects an item from the ListBox, the details of all of the properties for the Product are displayed in a series of controls. The code in Example 4-7 shows how to implement this type of scenario.

Example 4-7. Setting the DataContext for the selected product

C# private void lstProducts_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e) { Product product = (Product) lstProducts.SelectedItem; ...