WPF Listview binding - Get bound item in code behind

Question

I'm trying to access the UserControl's bound object (generated from listView itemsource) from codebehind.

I have the following code:

<ListView x:Name="lst1">
    <ListView.ItemTemplate>
       <Controls:MyUserControl />  
    </ListView.ItemTemplate>
<ListView>

---

public void Load()
{
    lst1.ItemsSource = List<Customer> from database ......
}

In each user control that is gererated, I want to access the Customer object that the user control is getting it's values from, ie:

public MyUserControl()
{
    InitializeComponent();

    Customer cust = (Customer)this.DataContext;
    // cust is null????
}

This code successfully displays properties from the Customer object, I just can't seem to find it in the code behind.

Please help.

Answer 1

Does the compiler really let you assign object to Customer without a cast?

Anyway, DataContext won't be initialized yet in the constructor.

You could handle the DataContextChanged event, which will be raised whenever DataContext changes -- in this case, that'll probably just be when it's assigned in the course of instantiating the DataTemplate that creates MyUserControl . And that's just what you want.

XAML

<UserControl
    ...
    DataContextChanged="MyUserControl_DataContextChanged"
    ...

C#

private Customer _customer;
void MyUserControl_DataContextChanged(object sender, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
{
    _customer = (Customer)DataContext;
}

Or you could just cast DataContext to Customer whenever you need to use it. Check for null , of course. You didn't say what you're doing with Customer so it's hard to be sure when you would need to do something with it.