Wpf treeview selectedItem databinding

Question

I have a view where I've got an object bound to a treeview. The object has a number of collections (of different types) so I'm using hiearchical templates with a CompositeCollection to display them in the treeview.

I've then got a textbox that is bound to the treeview's selectedItem. Here I'm serialising the selectedItem to XML and displaying it in the textbox for editing.

All good so far. However, the big problem I have is that I can't use 2-way databinding with the SelectedItem property of the treeview as it is read only.

How can I cleanly keep the textbox edits in sync with my object that is bound to the treeview?

Answer 1

I do not think you need to do two-way databinding on the SelectedItem itself, you should expose a property in the class of your bound object which returns the serialized string and upon set modifies the object appropriately. This should be easier than dealing with the object as a whole.