Infragistics WPF

I am currently getting to grips with the Infragistics WPF controls that they call NetAdvantage for WPF  . So far I have found them easy to use, but the documentation of examples is very lax. Do not mistake me, these components are fantastic and do way more work for me than I would care to do myself, but if you Google a particular piece of their API invariable you will get pure documentation and no samples. If you are lucky someone has asked a specific question about it and you can skim their answers, but the likely hood of finding an answer to your question is negligible in my experience.

I still love the components, it just makes it a little more difficult to develop with them…

An example would maybe get us all on the same page:

I am using their Ribbon components in one of my applications and wanted to dynamically generate (using a binding) the menu options.

   1: <igRibbon:XamRibbon.ApplicationMenu>

   2: 

   3:             <igRibbon:ApplicationMenu>

   4:                 <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxTeamServerMenuTool" Caption="Team Server" ItemsSource="{Binding AvailableServers}"                                           ItemTemplate="{DynamicResource tAvailableServers}" ButtonType="DropDown"                                           LargeImage="ResourcesImagesTeamServerSelectIcon.png">

   5:                 </igRibbon:MenuTool>

   6:                 <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxTeamProjectMenuTool" Caption="Team Project" ItemsSource="{Binding AvailableProjects}"                                             ButtonType="DropDown" SmallImage="ResourcesImagesTeamProjectSelectIcon.png">

   7:                 </igRibbon:MenuTool>

   8:                 <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxHeatConnectionMenuTool" Caption="Heat Server" ButtonType="DropDown">

   9:                 </igRibbon:MenuTool>

  10:                 <igRibbon:MenuTool x:Name="uxHeatApplicationMenuTool" Caption="Heat App" ButtonType="DropDown" >

  11:                 </igRibbon:MenuTool>

  12:                 <!-- Place a button in the footer of the ApplicationMenu that allows the user to quit the application. -->

  13:                 <igRibbon:ApplicationMenu.FooterToolbar>

  14:                     <igRibbon:ApplicationMenuFooterToolbar>

  15:                         <igRibbon:ButtonTool Caption="Settings" Command="local:Commands.ClearSettingsCommand" />

  16:                         <igRibbon:ButtonTool Caption="Exit" />

  17:                     </igRibbon:ApplicationMenuFooterToolbar>

  18:                 </igRibbon:ApplicationMenu.FooterToolbar>

  19:             </igRibbon:ApplicationMenu>

  20:         </igRibbon:XamRibbon.ApplicationMenu>

As you can see in line 4 there is a binding that does indeed populate the list. But I am having trouble getting the template to take. I want the Items listed as a set of radio buttons (kinda) and so I added a Template:

   1: <DataTemplate x:Key="tAvailableServers" DataType="{x:Type tfs:TeamFoundationServer}">

   2:            <igRibbon:RadioButtonTool

   3:                            Caption="{Binding Name}"

   4:                            Tag="{Binding}"

   5:                            LargeImage="ResourcesImagesTeamServerSelectIcon.png"

   6:                            igRibbon:MenuToolBase.MenuItemDescription="{Binding Url.ToString}"/>

   7:        </DataTemplate>

This should have displayed what I wanted, but it seams to be ignored.

To allow this to work, all I needed to do was remove the x:Key from the template. But why can’t I specify a template by name. What if I wanted to have two templates and choose which one was displayed…

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