How not to lose binding source updates?
- by Fyodor Soikin
Suppose I have a modal dialog with a textbox and OK/Cancel buttons. And it is built on MVVM - i.e. it has a ViewModel object with a string property that the textbox is bound to.
Say, I enter some text in the textbox and then grab my mouse and click "OK". Everything works fine: at the moment of click, the textbox loses focus, which causes the binding engine to update the ViewModel's property. I get my data, everybody's happy.
Now suppose I don't use my mouse. Instead, I just hit Enter on the keyboard. This also causes the "OK" button to "click", since it is marked as IsDefault="True". But guess what? The textbox doesn not lose focus in this case, and therefore, the binding engine remains innocently ignorant, and I don't get my data. Dang!
Another variation of the same scenario: suppose I have a data entry form right in the main window, enter some data into it, and then hit Ctrl+S for "Save". Guess what? My latest entry doesn't get saved!
This may be somewhat remedied by using UpdateSourceTrigger=PropertyChanged, but that is not always possible.
One obvious case would be the use of StringFormat with binding - the text keeps jumping back into "formatted" state as I'm trying to enter it.
And another case, which I have encountered myself, is when I have some time-consuming processing in the viewmodel's property setter, and I only want to perform it when the user is "done" entering text.
This seems like an eternal problem: I remember trying to solve it systematically from ages ago, ever since I've started working with interactive interfaces, but I've never quite succeeded. In the past, I always ended up using some sort of hacks - like, say, adding an "EnsureDataSaved" method to every "presenter" (as in "MVP") and calling it at "critical" points, or something like that...
But with all the cool technologies, as well as empty hype, of WPF, I expected they'd come up with some good solution.
