Orc.Prism

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Find the source at https://github.com/WildGums/Orc.Prism5.

Name	Badge
Chat
Downloads
Stable version
Unstable version

Find the source at https://github.com/WildGums/Orc.Prism6.

Introduction

Orc.Prism empowers users to combine both Catel and Prism. The best way to do this is to use the MVVM functionality from Catel and the modularity / UI composition from Prism.

If you want to use only a selected feature set of Prism (such as the regions) and don’t want to set up a custom bootstrapper, use the following code before creating the main window:

PrismHelper.PrepareWithoutBootstrapper();

Then call the following code after creating the main window:

PrismHelper.InitializeMainWindow();

The latest version of the guidance, Prism, includes a feature named “User Interface Composition”. Basically it allows build a mosaic like application by loading multiple views that comes from different modules into an active regions exposed by a control, also know as the shell.

But all this is about view models. Therefore, the Catel team decide to introduce an extension that implements a good starting point in order create a composite user interface without actually referencing any view. At this point, you must have heared about of the UIVisualizerService, and the way it can resolve a view from an instance of a view model. So, we are please to introduce you the UICompositionService.

Making the region manager available

First of all, you must make available the region manager on the instance of ServiceLocator. A Prism based application uses MEF or Unity as primary IoC container. Therefore, you must synchronize this container with the Catel one, overriding the ConfigureContainer method of the application Bootstrapper class, using the following code:

protected override void ConfigureContainer()
{
	base.ConfigureContainer();

	if (ServiceLocator.Instance.IsExternalContainerSupported(this.Container))
	{
		ServiceLocator.Instance.RegisterExternalContainer(this.Container);
	}
}

but if you use ServiceLocator primary IoC contanier, and your Bootstrapper class inherits from BootstrapperBase the region manager is actually available and you don’t have to write the synchronization container code.

Since Catel 3.2 ServiceLocator support Dependency injection, therefore now you are able write Prism base application without the usage of a third party container.

Activating a view into a specific region

To activate a view into a specific region, use the following code:

var viewModel = new EmployeeViewModel();

var dependencyResolver = this.GetDependencyResolver();
var uiCompositionService = dependencyResolver.Resolve<IUICompositionService>();
uiCompositionService.Activate(viewModel, "MainRegion");

var dependencyResolver = this.GetDependencyResolver();
var uiVisualizerService = dependencyResolver.Resolve<IUIVisualizerService>();

var uiCompositionService = dependencyResolver.Resolve<IUICompositionService>()
var windowViewModel = new WindowWithRegionViewModel();

uiVisualizerService.Show(windowViewModel, () => { uiCompositionService.Activate(new EmployeeViewModel(), windowViewModel, "WindowMainRegion") });

uiCompositionService.Deactivate(viewModel);

Contributions

We would like to thank the following contributors:

Want to contribute to the documentation? We have a guide for that!

Questions

Have a question about Catel or WildGums controls? Use StackOverflow with the Catel tag!