Book Image

Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook

By : Ramesh Thalli
Book Image

Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook

By: Ramesh Thalli

Overview of this book

Windows Phone 7.5 Mango contains support for apps written in Silverlight or XNA. These apps can store data on the device, and also load and manipulate data from "the cloud" and other web services.This Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook has a range of recipes to help you apply data handling concepts. You will be able to apply the knowledge gained from these recipes to build your own apps effectively. This Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook starts with data binding concepts at the UI layer and then shows different ways of saving data locally and externally in databases. The book ends with a look at the popular MVVM software design pattern. The recipes contained in this book will make you an expert in the areas of data access and storage.

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Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook
Ramesh Thalli
Oct, 2011 | 224 pages
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Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook
Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Data Binding to UI Elements
Data Binding to UI Elements
Introduction
Element binding
DataContext
Data Templates
How DataMode is used
Converting data for display
Building a simple app
2
Isolated Storage
Isolated Storage
Introduction
Saving user settings
Opening and creating a file
Saving username and password to a local store
Saving a background image to local storage
3
XML as a Data Store
XML as a Data Store
Introduction
Opening a local XML file
Navigating the XML file
Opening a remote XML file
Object serialization to XML
4
Using Open Data
Using Open Data
Introduction
Consuming OData services
Searching OData services
CRUD operations with OData
5
Using On-Device Databases
Using On-Device Databases
Introduction
Overview of SQLite Studio
SQLite Client as an embedded database
Using SQLite as a local store for the MyTasks App
SQL CE as a local store
McObject Perst as an embedded object database
6
Representational State Transfer—REST
Representational State Transfer—REST
Introduction
Consuming RSS Feeds
Using the Twitter API
Building a simple REST service
7
Windows Communication Framework—WCF
Windows Communication Framework—WCF
Introduction
Writing and consuming a simple web service
Building a service layer using WCF
WCF using ADO.NET Entity Framework
Using LINQ to SQL for creating the service
8
Model View ViewModel
Model View ViewModel
Introduction
Simple MVVM application
Using MVVM Light Toolkit
Updating the MVVM application
Index
Index

Data Templates

Data Templates are a very powerful feature in XAML. Data Templates can be reusable within element level or application level. In this recipe, let's use the Data Template in the listbox control.

Getting ready

Let's create a new project using the template Ch1_Recipe and rename it as Ch1_Recipe3.

How to do it...

  1. In this recipe we will give priority to the ListBox control.

  2. Open the MainPage.xaml file, locate the Grid with the name ContentPanel and add a TextBlock and a ListBox after the last text block control. The ListBox control will contain ItemTemplate in which DataTemplate is added.

    <!-- List box priority -->
<TextBlock x:Name ="tbPriority" Text ="Priority:" Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column ="0" />

<ListBox x:Name ="lstPriority" Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column ="1">
  <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
    <DataTemplate>
      <Border Name="border" BorderBrush="Red" BorderThickness="1" Padding="5" Margin="5">

        <StackPanel>
          <TextBlock x:Name ="tbPriorityContent" Text ="{Binding}" />
        </StackPanel>
      </Border>
    </DataTemplate>
  </ListBox.ItemTemplate>
</ListBox>

  3. Let's initialize the Listbox in the code behind the XAML file, MainPage.xaml.cs, using the ItemsSource property of the ListBox. ItemSource is a collection property. Add the following code inside the MainPage constructor before the initialization:

    lstPriority.ItemsSource = new string[] { "Low", "Medium", "High" };

  4. Press F5 to see how the ListBox is filled with Low, Medium, and High values. Also, notice how the ListBox behavior changes with the Border style.

How it works...

A Data Template is the most flexible way to display data in XAML. It can include all the XAML controls like button, text blocks, textboxes, data grid, and so on. Here in the ListBox control, a Data Template is applied to all the items in the listbox along with all the formatting properties. We applied the Red border to the items in the DataTemplate mark-up.

There's more...

To understand more on Data Templates check the following article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742521.aspx

See also

Check the recipe named DataContext to understand more on data context concepts.

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