Friday, November 13, 2009

Magellan and the MVVM Light Toolkit

by Paul Stovell via Paul Stovell on 11/13/2009 7:13:39 AM

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The MVVM Light Toolkit is an MVVM framework by WPF MVP Laurent Bugnion, the author of Silverlight 2 Unleashed. It works well alongside Magellan and makes it easy to put behaviors behind views. The integration model with Magellan is quite similar to using the Microsoft MVVM toolkit.

One difference is that the MVVM Light Toolkit typically uses resources to refer to the ViewModel, limiting the amount of code behind that is required. Since Magellan controllers typically create the model, this does need to change.

As with using the Microsoft MVVM toolkit, we use the controller to create the ViewModel:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Main()
    {
        Model = new MainViewModel();
        return Page();
    }
}

MVVM Light views typically use a locator for creating the view model - this is a problem because our controller above will be creating the VM, and Magellan is taking care of assigning it.

<Window x:Class="MvvmLight1.MvvmView1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" 
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    mc:Ignorable="d"
    DataContext="{Binding Main, Source={StaticResource Locator}}"
    >

To keep Blend support, change the XAML to use d:DataContext instead of DataContext.

<Window x:Class="MvvmLight1.MvvmView1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:ViewModel="clr-namespace:MvvmLight1.ViewModel" 
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" 
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    mc:Ignorable="d"
    d:DataContext="{x:Type ViewModel:MainViewModel}"
    >

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