在许多控件上实现INotifyPropertyChanged的优雅方式

Question

I'm building a WPF application and I'm slowly uncovering some of the joys and also the frustrations of using WPF. My latest question involves updating the UI using INotifyPropertyChanged

My app has stacked UserControls with each UserControl containing multiple controls, so overall there are hundreds of controls which update every second providing live data. In order to update all controls I'm using something similar to below which does currently work as intended.

namespace ProjectXAML
{
    public partial class ProjectX : UserControl, INotifyPropertyChanged
    {


#region Declare Getter/Setter with INotifyPropertyChanged groupx3

        private string m_group1Text1;
        public string group1Text1
        {
            get
            {
                return m_group1Text1;
            }
            set
            {
                m_group1Text1 = value;
                NotifyPropertyChanged("group1Text1");
            }
        }

        private string m_group1Text2;
        public string group1Text2
        {
            get
            {
                return m_group1Text2;
            }
            set
            {
                m_group1Text2 = value;
                NotifyPropertyChanged("group1Text2");
            }
        }

        private string m_group2Text1;
        public string group2Text1
        {
            get
            {
                return m_group2Text1;
            }
            set
            {
                m_group2Text1 = value;
                NotifyPropertyChanged("group2Text1");
            }
        }

        private string m_group2Text2;
        public string group2Text2
        {
            get
            {
                return m_group2Text2;
            }
            set
            {
                m_group2Text2 = value;
                NotifyPropertyChanged("group2Text2");
            }
        }

        private string m_group3Text1;
        public string group3Text1 
        { 
            get
            {
                return m_group3Text1;
            }
            set
            {
                m_group3Text1 = value;
                NotifyPropertyChanged("group3Text1");
            }
        }

        private string m_group3Text2;
        public string group3Text2
        {
            get
            {
                return m_group3Text2;
            }
            set
            {
                m_group3Text2 = value;
                NotifyPropertyChanged("group3Text2");
            }
        }

 #endregion

 #region INotifyPropertyChanged Members

        public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

        /// Notifies the property changed.
        private void NotifyPropertyChanged(string property)
        {
            if (PropertyChanged != null)
            {
                PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(property));
            }
        }
 #endregion

}
}

My questions are:

1. Is there a more elegant way to raise PropertyChanged events for lots of controls rather than lots of get/set code?

2. Is there a way to raise 1 PropertyChanged event covering the whole UserControl containing multiple controls instead of a separate event for every control? Is there a better method than what I'm attempting?

Answer 1

For point 1 if you are using VS 2012 you can do the below

private void SetProperty<T>(ref T field, T value, [CallerMemberName] string name = "")
{
    if (!EqualityComparer<T>.Default.Equals(field, value))
    {
        field = value;
        var handler = PropertyChanged;
        if (handler != null)
        {
          handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name));
        }
    }
}

and then you can use your set property method without having to hard code the name of the properties.

Note the above code is an except of the below link http://danrigby.com/2012/03/01/inotifypropertychanged-the-net-4-5-way/

Answer 2

Use the design pattern model view controler . So the model will raise the changes for you. Together with MVVM the controls will see with its dependency objects the changes and view them automatically.

Answer 3

In strict reference to this part of your question..."Is there a way to raise 1 PropertyChanged event covering the whole UserControl containing ".

Yes, you can raise a PropertyChanged notification which says all my properties on my object are updated.

Use:

NotifyPropertyChanged(null);

then this informs the listener of INotifyPropertyChanged that all properties have changed on an object.

This isn't normally used...and can be abused....and cause inefficient updates eg if you were only changing a few properties and used that.

But you could argue the case for using it if you have lots of properties in your object, that you were always changing anyway at the same time...and you wanted to collapse lots of individual notifications into 1 that was raised after you had modified all properties.

Example use case (ie presumes you are updating all your groups in some way):

void UpdateAllGroupTextProperties()
{
    group1Text1 = "groupA";
    group1Text2 = "groupA2";
    group2Text1 = "groupB";
    group2Text2 = "groupB2";
    group3Text1 = "groupC";
    group3Text2 = "groupC2";
    NotifyPropertyChanged(null);
}