How to implement menuitems that depend on current selection in WPF MVVM explorer-like application
- by Doug
I am new to WPF and MVVM, and I am working on an application utilizing both. The application is similar to windows explorer, so consider an app with a main window with menu (ShellViewModel), a tree control (TreeViewModel), and a list control (ListViewModel). I want to implement menu items such as Edit - Delete, which deletes the currently selected item (which may be in the tree or in the list).
I am using Josh Smith's RelayCommand, and binding the menuitem to a DeleteItemCommand in the ShellViewModel is easy. It seems like implementing the DeleteItemCommand, however, requires some fairly tight coupling between the ShellViewModel and the two child view models (TreeViewModel and ListViewModel) to keep track of the focus/selection and direct the action to the proper child for implementation. That seems wrong to me, and makes me think I'm missing something.
Writing a focus manager and/or selection manager to do the bookkeeping does not seem too hard, and could be done without coupling the classes together. The windowing system is already keeping track of which view has the focus, and it seems like I'd be duplicating code.
What I'm not sure about is how I would route the command from the ShellViewModel down to either the ListViewModel or the TreeViewModel to do the actual work without making a mess of the code. Some day, the application will be extended to include more than two children, and I want the shell to be as ignorant of the children as possible to make that extension as painless as possible.
Looking at some sample WPF/MVVM applications (Karl Shifflett's CipherText, Josh Smith's MVVM Demo, etc.), I haven't seen any code that does this (or I didn't understand it).
Regardless of whether you think my approach is way off base or I'm just missing a small nuance, please share your thoughts and help me get back on track. Thanks!
