Handling selection and deselection of objects in a user interface
- by Dennis
I'm writing a small audio application (in Silverlight, but that's not really relevant I suppose), and I'm a struggling with a problem I've faced before and never solved properly. This time I want to get it right.
In the application there is one Arrangement control, which contains several Track controls, and every Track can contain AudioObject controls (these are all custom user controls). The user needs to be able to select audio objects, and when these objects are selected they are rendered differently. I can make this happen by hooking into the MouseDown event of the AudioObject control and setting state accordingly. So far so good, but when an audio object is selected, all other audio objects need to be deselected (well, unless the user holds the shift key). Audio objects don't know about other audio objects though, so they have no way to tell the rest to deselect themselves.
Now if I would approach this problem like I did the last time I would pass a reference to the Arrangement control in the constructor of the AudioObject control and give the Arrangement control a DeselectAll() method or something like that, which would tell all Track controls to deselect all their AudioObject controls. This feels wrong, and if I apply this strategy to similar issues I'm afraid I will soon end up with every object having a reference to every other object, creating one big tightly coupled mess. It feels like opening the floodgates for poorly designed code.
Is there a better way to handle this?
