I am fairly new at Silverlight development and I usually have an issue that needs research every day. Which I enjoy, since I like the idea of going into a day knowing that I am  going to learn something new. The issue that I am currently working on centers around relay commands. I have a pretty good handle on Relay Commands and how we use them within our applications.

<Button Command="{Binding ButtonCommand}" CommandParameter="NewRecruit" Content="New Recruit" />

Here in our xaml we have a button. The button has a Command and a CommandParameter. The command binds to the ButtonCommand that we have in our ViewModel

RelayCommand _buttonCommand;
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the button command.
        /// </summary>
        /// <value>The button command.</value>
        public RelayCommand ButtonCommand
        {
            get
            {
                if (_buttonCommand == null)
                {
                    _buttonCommand = new RelayCommand(
                        x => x != null && x.ToString().Length > 0 && CheckCommandAvailable(x.ToString()),
                        x => ExecuteCommand(x.ToString()));
                }
                return _buttonCommand;
            }
        }

In our relay command we then do some checks with a lambda expression. We check if the command  parameter is null, is the length greater than 0 and we have a CheckCommandAvailable method that will tell  us if the button is even enabled. After we check on these three items we then pass the command parameter to an action method.

This is all pretty straight forward, the issue that we solved a few days ago centered around having a control that needed to use a Relay Command and this control was a nested control and was using a different DataContext. The example below illustrates how we handled this scenario.

In our xaml usercontrol we had to set a name to this control.

<Controls3:RadTileViewItem x:Class="RecruitStatusTileView"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" 
    xmlns:Controls1="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls" 
    xmlns:Controls2="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.Input" 
    xmlns:Controls3="clr-namespace:Telerik.Windows.Controls;assembly=Telerik.Windows.Controls.Navigation" 
    mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignHeight="400" d:DesignWidth="800" Header="{Binding Title,Mode=TwoWay}" MinimizedHeight="100" 
                           x:Name="StatusView">

Here we are using a telerik RadTileViewItem. We set the name of this control to “StatusView”. In our button control we set our command parameters and commands different than the example above.

<HyperlinkButton Content="{Binding BigBoardButtonText, Mode=TwoWay}" CommandParameter="{Binding 'Position.PositionName'}" Command="{Binding ElementName=StatusView, Path=DataContext.BigBoardCommand, Mode=TwoWay}" />

This hyperlink button lives in a ListBox control and this listbox has an ItemSource of PositionSelectors. The Command Parameter is binding to the Position.Position property of that PositionSelectors object. This again is pretty straight forward again. What gets a bit tricky is the Command property in the hyperlink. It is binding to the element name we created in the user control (StatusView) Because this hyperlink is in a listbox and is in the item template it doesn’t have a direct handle on the DataContext that the RadTileViewItem has so we have to make sure it does. We do that by binding to the element name of status view then set the path to DataContext.BigBoardCommand. BigBoardCommand is the name of the RelayCommand in the view model.

private RelayCommand _bigBoardCommand = null;
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets the big board command.
        /// </summary>
        /// <value>The big board command.</value>
        public RelayCommand BigBoardCommand
        {
            get
            {
                if (_bigBoardCommand == null)
                {
                    _bigBoardCommand = new RelayCommand(x => true, x => AddToBigBoard(x.ToString()));
                }
                return _bigBoardCommand;
            }
        }

From there we check for true again and then call the action and pass in the parameter that we had as the command parameter.

What we are working on now is a bit trickier than this second example. In the above example we are only creating this TileViewItem with this name “StatusView” once. In another part of our application we are generating multiple TileViewItems, so we cannot set the name in the control as we cant have multiple controls with the same name. When we run the application we get an error that reads that the value is out of expected range. My searching has led me to think we cannot have multiple controls with the same name.

This is today’s problem and Ill post the solution to this once it is found.