Simple Class Binding in XAML

Muhammad Arslan Siddiqui
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Data binding is that robust way to connect your properties with any data source. In this tutorial we will dig into class binding step-by-step. If you are already familiar with class binding then you can skip this tutorial.

Class Binding

Class Binding provides high-level access to the definition of a binding that connects the properties of the binding target objects and any data source (for example, a database, an XML file, or any object that contains data). It is so strong and easy that one can easily interact with data within the application and can bind the data with any of the properties of the objects.

Let's Dig

To understand class binding we will go through the following procedure for easy comprehension. First we will create a simple Windows 8.1 Silverlight application. This application will show the data of the object bound with the items of the Listbox.

blank app
Fig:1. Creating the Project.

Give the project a good name. Once you have created the project, you will see the following screen:

create project

Now for the class binding, we will create a class first, in this case I will create a class named Country:

class name country

We will add some Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) to our class:

class

After creating the class, we will move the MainPage.xaml and will add the Listbox to the Content Panel as in the following:

main page

Then, it would be noteworthy to specify how to customize the items in the listbox, so customizing the listbox item Template and as our class has three data members, we will add three controls to each item, in this case I will use two textblocks and one checkbox for the bool data member.

You can see in this figure that the checkbox and the textblocks are being bound with the data members of the class (Country), so basically the XAML code that actually binds the class is as in the following:

<CheckBox IsChecked="{Binding IsMember}"/>
<TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Name="CountryName" Text="{Binding CountryName}"/>
<TextBlock Grid.Column="2" Name="txtShortName" Text="{Binding ShortName}"/>

Now to load some dummy data into the Country class we will create the load event and add some data on the load event of the Page, for that we will need to create the list and add some objects of class Country to that list and then make this list the source for the listbox. Here is the C# code of that:

cs code