CLASS Extensions. Making of (Part II)

Crashing your LightSwitch project with your extensions is a piece of cake. The first simplest thing I did was change the business type to handle integer values instead of string ones. But I changed “:String” to “:Int”. That was enough to do it. It should be “:Int32”.
So, after managing to create and use (declare as a type for an integer field in an entity) my business type, keeping my LightSwitch project in one piece, I had to work on my control. As I have already mentioned I had my custom control ready and tested, so, it should be easy.
I had used my custom control only in detail parts and although the expander used was “deforming” the layout when expanded (I have to fix this anyhow in the future) everything were going back to normal after collapsing the expander. This was not so for collections. Using my control in a grid the result after collapsing the color picker control was a grid row having a height of the expanded control. The reason is that the grid rows are auto-sized and have no specific height so…
I was only after having implemented a wrapper control to provide 2 different controls, one for collections and one for details, based on the reply by Justin Anderson to a thread initially intended to help me handle read-only controls, that I got an answer from Silverlight forum where I knew it was the right place to post my question. Either way, implementing what the reply suggested (although it works fine) required a lot of handling of transitions between expanded and collapsed. Also the “deform” in a grid when the control is expanded(even temporary) is, in my opinion, more annoying than in details.

if ((this.DataContext as IContentItem).ContainerState.HasFlag(ContainerState.Cell)) {
  ColorControl control = new ColorControl();
  control.DataContext = this.DataContext;
  control.SetBinding(ColorControl.IsReadOnlyProperty, new Binding("IsReadOnly"));
  MainGrid.Children.Add(control);
}
else {
  ColorPickerDrop control = new ColorPickerDrop();
  control.DataContext = this.DataContext;
  control.SetBinding(ColorPickerDrop.IsReadOnlyProperty, new Binding("IsReadOnly"));
  MainGrid.Children.Add(control);
}

In the code above you can see selecting the control to “use” based on the ContainerState property of the IContentItem that is passed as DataContext. You can also see the attempt to make the control read-only. My attempt was to make the controls automatically read-only when “Use read-only controls” is checked from the designer. I was that close…
Also for some reason my control when implemented in extension tended to take too much space by default. I had to change alignment to left/top by hand. It was only after releasing the first (and only one available until now) version that I managed to handle this along with other issues regarding designer behavior.
Hopefully before the end of 2011 I will be able to publish the next version, which contains also one more business type (rating) and respective control.
In the next post I will discuss the read-only issue that I didn’t manage to deal with in the published version…