How to present a collection of objects in a listbox in WPF

I have a collection of objects that I want to present. How can I do this? A listbox would do but each object has many attributes which I want to present. I already bound a listbox to a collection a开发者_JAVA百科nd I have all my objects listed. My question is regarding the visualization of the listbox and if the listbox is the correct thing to use or there is something else that I should use.

I find the existing answers to be a bit lacking, normally one would not process collections or boil their items down to a string, at the very best you would do some dynamic manipulation using a CollectionView (e.g. sorting, grouping), but normally you use Data Templating to display the individual items which allows you to use all their properties.

Further there are several controls which work well with collections, firstly you need to know if you want selection, if not an ItemsControl is a good choice, otherwise you should use a ListBox or ListView.

ListViews are normally employed if you have different views for your objects, e.g. a details view and a thumbnail view. You can use the ListView.View for this, there is one existing view in the framework, the GridView, which offers columns. What Matthew Ferreira suggested is exactly what you should not do with a ListView since you want to make the templates dependent on the current view, in fact that code does not even compile since DataTemplate can only have one child.

ListViews are supposed to encapsulate the view logic in their view so it can be changed at will. If you decide to use a ItemsControl or ListBox then setting the ItemTemplate is what you want to do. Read the Data Templating overview i linked to, it makes for a good starting point.

You might want to consider using a ListView control instead. ListView has support for columns if you are planning on showing several properties from your object. You can use the ItemTemplate property to format the display of your object. For example:

<ListView ItemsSource="{Binding Path=myObjectCollection}">
    <ListView.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
            <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Title}"/>
            <CheckBox IsChecked="{Binding Path=ShouldCheck}"/>
        </DataTemplate>
    </ListView.ItemTemplate>
</ListView>

This example assumes that your object has the properties Title and ShouldCheck.

Your collection of object is probably to be viewed as your model. The usual thing in WPF is to add a ViewModel that translates and exposes the model data into a form suitable for binding. Depending on what you want to do, your VM could e.g. format each object into a string representation and then expose it as a collection of strings that the Listbox can bind to and display.