Custom Listbox: Limit Maximum Item Count

I have silverlight 3.0 project that has a listbox that is databound to a list of items. What I want to do is limit the number of items displayed in the listbox to be <= 10. I originally accomplished this by limiting the data bound to the list to 10 items by doing a .Take(10) on my orignal data and databinding the result.

The problem w/ the .Take(10) approach is that the original datasource may change and since .Take() returns a reference (or copy not sure) of the original data I sometimes do not see changes in the data reflected in my UI.

I'm trying to figure out a better way of handling this rather than the .Take() approach. It seems you shouldn't 'filter' your data using LINQ functions if you have more than one UI element bound to the same data. My only thought on how to do this better is to make a custom container that will limit the count, but that s开发者_开发百科eems like it might be a mountain of work to make a custom stackpanel or equivalent.

Take(10) does not make a copy, it just appends another step to the LINQ query. But all execution is still deferred till someone pulls the items of the query.

If you were setting the items statically, a copy would indeed be created, by running the query once. But since you set the constructed query as the ItemsSource property of the list box, it can run and update it any time, so it is the right approach.

The real reason why you sometimes do not see changes in the data reflected in the UI is that the list box has no way to determine why the data returned by the query have changed and it surely doesn't want to keep constantly trying to refetch the data and maybe update itself. You need to let it know.

How can you let it know? The documentation for ItemsSource says that "you should set the ItemsSource to an object that implements the INotifyCollectionChanged interface so that changes in the collection will be reflected (...).". Apparently the default way of doing things by .Net itself does not work in your case.

So there are some examples how to implement that yourself e.g. in this SO answer. If even the top-level source data collection (over which you are doing the LINQ query) does not support these notifications (which you would just forward), you might need to update the list box manually from your other code which changes the underlying data.