MVVM Madness: Commands

Question

I like MVVM. I don\'t love it, but like it. Most of it makes sense. But, I keep reading articles that encourage you to write a lot of code so that you can write XAML and don\'t

Answer 1

What @JP describes in the original question and @Heinzi mentions in is answer is a pragmatic approach to handling difficult commands. Using a tiny bit of event handling code in the code behind comes in especially handy when you need to do a little UI work before invoking the command.

Consider the classic case of the OpenFileDialog. It's much easier to use a click event on the button, display the dialog, and then send the results to a command on your ViewModel than to adopt any of the complicated messaging routines used by the MVVM toolkits.

In your XAML:

<Button DockPanel.Dock="Left" Click="AttachFilesClicked">Attach files</Button>

In your code behind:

    private void AttachFilesClicked(object sender, System.Windows.RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        // Configure open file dialog box
        Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog dlg = new Microsoft.Win32.OpenFileDialog();
        dlg.FileName = "Document"; // Default file name
        dlg.DefaultExt = ".txt"; // Default file extension
        dlg.Filter = "Text documents (.txt)|*.txt"; // Filter files by extension

        // Show open file dialog box
        bool? result = dlg.ShowDialog();

        // Process open file dialog box results
        if (result == true)
        {
            string filename = dlg.FileName;

            // Invoke the command.
            MyViewModel myViewModel = (MyViewModel)DataContext;
            if (myViewModel .AttachFilesCommand.CanExecute(filename))
            {
                noteViewModel.AttachFilesCommand.Execute(filename);  
            }
        }
    }

Computer programming is inflexible. We programmers have to be flexible to order to deal with that.