Event-based communication between “sibling” views

Question

I'm pretty new to WPF so I've been struggling with some basic concepts.

My application consists out of a main window containing various tabs. The first tab is used to add files, activating the other tabs which operate on the given files. For simplicity, let's call the latter "DataTabs".

I'm not sure about how to correctly communicate between the tabs. Currently, the FileInputTab uses a designated ICommand to do the following: Read the data, create a view model for the DataTab, and raise a "ViewModelReadyEvent" using the FileInputTab's view.

This event then bubbles up to the MainWindow, which activates the DataTabs and passes the created ViewModel on to them.

Now, two things I'm struggling with.

Populating the view model Is it a better approach to populate the view model for the DataTabs inside their corresponding views, rather than from the FileInputTab that actually has nothing to do with it? This way, I could correctly establish a reference between the two, but I would have to perform the population separatly for every DataTab. Any thoughts?

Communication between "sibling" views It doesn't feel right to let the event bubble up all the way to the MainWindow to let it orchestrate all inter-view communcation. I looked into RoutingStrategies, but I can't find any way to directly communicate between "sibling" views. I would like to raise an event in the FileInputTab and directly act on it in the DataTabs, without any intermediate.

Any thoughts, comments or book recommendations by WPF experts would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Using MVVM you could introduce a ViewModel for every tab. Then you could write a Service for the communication between the ViewModels. It is quite easy if you use the Messenger Pattern. One ViewModel sends a message to the Service and the Service leads it forward to the other ViewModel. The Service would also do the work, so your ViewModel would not have any business logic.

MVVM Light helps you a lot with the MVVM pattern.

Answer 2

您可以使用IEventAggregator在ViewModel之间进行通信。