Get and Iterate through Controls from a TabItem?

Question

How to get all the Controls/UIElements which are nested in a Tabitem (from a TabControl)?

I tried everything but wasn\'t able to get them.

(Set the SelectedT

Answer 1

May be method of this kind will help you:

public static IEnumerable<T> FindChildren<T>(this DependencyObject source)
                                             where T : DependencyObject
{
  if (source != null)
  {
    var childs = GetChildObjects(source);
    foreach (DependencyObject child in childs)
    {
      //analyze if children match the requested type
      if (child != null && child is T)
      {
        yield return (T) child;
      }

      //recurse tree
      foreach (T descendant in FindChildren<T>(child))
      {
        yield return descendant;
      }
    }
  }
}

See full article (Finding Elements in the WPF Tree) here.

Answer 2

for me VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount always returns 0 for tab control, I had to use this method instead

 public static List<T> ObtenerControles<T>(DependencyObject parent)
    where T : DependencyObject
    {
        List<T> result = new List<T>();           
        if (parent != null)
        {
            foreach (var child in LogicalTreeHelper.GetChildren(parent))
            {                   
                var childType = child as T;
                if (childType != null)
                {
                    result.Add((T)child);
                }

                foreach (var other in ObtenerControles<T>(child as DependencyObject))
                {
                    result.Add(other);
                }
            }
        }

        return result;
    }

Answer 3

TabControl has Items property (derived from ItemsControl), which returns all TabItems - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.itemscontrol.items.aspx. Or you can traverse visual tree:

var firstStackPanelInTabControl = FindVisualChildren<StackPanel>(tabControl).First();

Using:

public static IEnumerable<T> FindVisualChildren<T>(DependencyObject rootObject) where T : DependencyObject
{
  if (rootObject != null)
  {
    for (int i = 0; i < VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(rootObject); i++)
    {
      DependencyObject child = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(rootObject, i);

      if (child != null && child is T)
        yield return (T)child;

      foreach (T childOfChild in FindVisualChildren<T>(child))
        yield return childOfChild;
    }
  }
}