Drag and Drop in Silverlight with F# and Asynchronous Workflows

Question

I'm trying to implement drag and drop in Silverlight using F# and asynchronous workflows.

I'm simply trying to drag around a rectangle on the canvas, using two loops for the the two states (waiting and dragging), an idea I got from Tomas Petricek's book "Real-world Functional Programming", but I ran into a problem:

Unlike WPF or WinForms, Silverlight's MouseEventArgs do not carry information about the button state, so I can't return from the drag-loop by checking if the left mouse button is no longer pressed. I only managed to solve this by introducing a mutable flag.

Would anyone have a solution for this, that does not involve mutable state?

Here's the relevant code part (please excuse the sloppy dragging code, which snaps the rectangle to the mouse pointer):

type MainPage() as this =
    inherit UserControl()
    do
        Application.LoadComponent(this, new System.Uri("/SilverlightApplication1;component/Page.xaml", System.UriKind.Relative))
    let layoutRoot : Canvas = downcast this.FindName("LayoutRoot")
    let rectangle1 : Rectangle = downcast this.FindName("Rectangle1")

    let mutable isDragged = false

    do
        rectangle1.MouseLeftButtonUp.Add(fun _ -> isDragged <- false)

        let rec drag() = async {
            let! args = layoutRoot.MouseMove |> Async.AwaitEvent
            if (isDragged) then
                Canvas.SetLeft(rectangle1, args.GetPosition(layoutRoot).X)
                Canvas.SetTop(rectangle1, args.GetPosition(layoutRoot).Y)
                return! drag()
            else
                return()
            } 
        let wait() = async {
            while true do
                let! args = Async.AwaitEvent rectangle1.MouseLeftButtonDown
                isDragged <- true
                do! drag()
            }

        Async.StartImmediate(wait())
        ()

Thank you very much for your time!

Answer 1

The way to solve this issue is to use an overloaded AwaitEvent that allows you to wait for two events. Instead of just waiting for MouseMove , you can also wait for the MouseUp event - in the first case, you can continue moving and in the second case, you can return from the loop and stop drag&drop (this is actually discussed later in the book in section 16.4.5 ).

Here is the code - it actually uses AwaitObservable variant of the method (see below), which is a better choice in general, because it works with Observable.map and similar combinators (in case you wanted to use these).

let! args = Async.AwaitObservable(layoutRoot.MouseMove, layoutRoot.MouseUp)
match args with
| Choice1Of2(args) ->
    // Handle the 'MouseMove' event with 'args' here
    Canvas.SetLeft(rectangle1, args.GetPosition(layoutRoot).X)  
    Canvas.SetTop(rectangle1, args.GetPosition(layoutRoot).Y)  
    return! drag()  
| Choice2Of2(_) ->
    // Handle the 'MouseUp' event here
    return()  

As far as I know, the overloaded AwaitObservable method is not available in the F# libraries (yet), but you can get it from t he book's web site , or you can use the following code:

// Adds 'AwaitObservable' that takes two observables and returns
// Choice<'a, 'b> containing either Choice1Of2 or Choice2Of2 depending
// on which of the observables occurred first
type Microsoft.FSharp.Control.Async with   
  static member AwaitObservable(ev1:IObservable<'a>, ev2:IObservable<'b>) = 
    Async.FromContinuations((fun (cont,econt,ccont) -> 
      let rec callback1 = (fun value ->
        remover1.Dispose()
        remover2.Dispose()
        cont(Choice1Of2(value)) )
      and callback2 = (fun value ->
        remover1.Dispose()
        remover2.Dispose()
        cont(Choice2Of2(value)) )
      // Attach handlers to both observables
      and remover1 : IDisposable  = ev1.Subscribe(callback1) 
      and remover2 : IDisposable  = ev2.Subscribe(callback2) 
      () ))