Navigating to view using prism navigation service is straight forward and there are lot of examples on web around this.With MVVM i always found ViewModel first approach as best because of lot of reasons, some of them are
- With MVVM, ViewModels is your application
- No threading issues as you will always create view models which can be created on any thread.
- More responsive , you are not dealing with dispatcher context to create views and let WPF system decide when to create views.
- No Memory leaks, The life cycle of views is controlled by WPF system in most efficient way
- More testable application, Since you app lives in view models and they don’t have UI beasts,
- And lot more..
This post cover a small trick to implement the ViewModel first navigation using Prism 5.0 for WPF.
1. What ever IoC you are using (the code is based on StructuralMap) expose the RegisterForNavigation<T> method and from module initialization, register interface of viewModels participating in navigation process. The RegisterForNavigation<T> will look like
public static void RegisterTypeForNavigation<T>(this ConfigurationExpression reg)
{
reg.For<object>().Use(() => ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance(typeof(T)))
.Named(typeof(T).FullName);
}
And some where in module initialization you call this method
configurationExpression .RegisterTypeForNavigation<ICustomerDetailViewModel>();
And to navigate to this view model just use
var parameters = new NavigationParameters { { "Activity", SelectedActivity }, { "ColumnName", columnName } };
var uri = new Uri(typeof(ICustomerDetailViewModel).FullName, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute);
regionManager.RequestNavigate(ShellRegions.Workspace, uri, parameters);
And obviously some where in you data template definition there should a (DataTemplate) mapping which WPF uses to swap the view model with corresponding view (and set data context too)..
Pixytech 