Programming WPF, 2nd Edition

List Controls

WPF offers several controls that can present multiple items. ListBox, ComboBox, and ListView can all present a linear sequence of items. TreeView presents a hierarchy of items. The TabControl may not seem like an obvious relative of the ListBox, but it shares the basic features: it presents a sequence of items (tab pages) and lets the user choose which is the current item. All of these controls share a common base class, ItemsControl.

The simplest way to use any of these controls is to add content to their Items property. Example 5-16 shows the markup for a ComboBox with various elements added to its Items.^[24]. This example illustrates that all list controls allow any content to be used as a list item—we're not restricted to plain text. This content model makes these list controls much more powerful than their Win32 equivalents.

Example 5-16. Content in Items

<ComboBox>
  <Button>Click!</Button>
  <TextBlock>Hello, world</TextBlock>
  <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
    <TextBlock>Ellipse:</TextBlock>
    <Ellipse Fill="Blue" Width="100" />
  </StackPanel>
</ComboBox>

You also can use this technique with ListBox, TabControl and ListView. (TreeView is a little more involved, as the whole point of that control is to show a tree of items, rather than a simple list. We'll see how to do that later.) As you can see in Figure 5-18, each control presents our items in its own way. The ListBox and ComboBox generate a line in the list for each item. The ListView does something similar, although ...