I'm trying to create a View in WPF and having a hard time figuring out how to set it up. Here's what I'm trying to build:

• My ViewModel exposes an IEnumerable property called Items
• Each item is an event on a timeline, and each one implements ITimelineItem
• The ViewModel for each item has it's own DataTemplate to to display it
• I want to display all the items on the timeline connected by a line. I'm thinking a WrapPanel inside of a ListView would work well for this.
• However, the height of each item will vary depending on the information it displays. Some items will have graphic objects right on the line (like a circle or a diamond, or whatever), and some have annotations above or below the line.

So it seems complicated to me. It seems that each item on the timeline has to render its own segment of the line. That's fine. But the distance between the top of the item to the line (and the bottom of the item to the line) could vary. If one item has the line 50 px down from the top and the next item has the line 100 px down from the top, then the first item needs 50 px of padding so that the line segments add up.

I think I could solve that problem, however, we only need to add padding if these two items are on the same line in the WrapPanel! Let's say there are 5 items and only room on the screen for 3 across... the WrapPanel will put the other two on the next line. That's ok, but that means only the first 3 need to pad together, and the last 2 need to pad together.

This is what's giving me a headache. Is there another approach I could look at?