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Showing posts from March, 2016

Binding Previous Item's data in ItemsControl

For a data-bound ItemsControl, each item in the source collection is the DataContext for the generated UI container.  By default, the binding expressions used in the ItemTemplate  are evaluated with respect to this DataContext.  This is useful if all of the information that  the template needs is contained in this context. This is actually the case in the vast  majority of data binding expressions.  However, there might be times when you also want  to take a peek at the previous item to do some work.  For example, say you are plotting a  sales chart and you want to show the percentage change in market share over five years. Here the change can be calculated within the ItemTemplate and shown in red for a decrease and in green for an increase. In this case, it is necessary to have information about the previous item in the data-bound list.  This is where the exact scenario that the  RelativeSource class was designed for with its PreviousData property.  RelativeSource.PreviousDa