Earlier today on Twitter Aaron Erickson was berating the inability to write linq statements directly in Xaml. While I’m not totally convinced that is a good idea to begin with I decided to come up with a little proof of concept to see if it’s even feasible. I was able to get about half way to what I would like to see by creating a custom markup extension called LinqBinding. The result allows you to create bindings such as this:
|
<sys:String x:Key=”query”>id > 1 && id < 4 || name==”six”</sys:String>
…
<ListBox ItemsSource=”{e:LinqBinding {StaticResource query}, Binding={Binding}}” />
|
The query in the string is the linq statement you would put into the where clause normally. I was unable to figure out how to use a Binding statement to a TextBox instead of having the hard-coded string but I’m pretty confident it is possible somehow (I’ll leave that for another blog post for now).
In order to accomplish this I used the code found in the Dynamic Linq examples talked about by Scott Guthrie in his blog.
Here is the sample: LinqExtensionSample.zip
