Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook

Hooking into the data binding process

We may want to perform some additional formatting for some types of data that we want to display using data binding. Think of a date. Normally, a date is stored in the database as a combination of a date and time. However, we may only want to display the date part—perhaps formatted according to a particular culture. Another example is a currency; the value is normally stored in the database as a double. In an application, we may want to format it by putting a dollar or a euro sign in front of it.

Silverlight's data binding engine offers us a hook in the data binding process, thereby allowing us to format, change, or do whatever we want to do with the data in both directions. This is achieved through the use ...