XAML Basics Series Index Page

The next post in the series originally written by Beatriz Stollnitz. Original post available on Github.

How to get a ListBoxItem from a data bound ListBox

Data binding a list box to an enumeration of items could not be easier in WPF:

<Window.Resources>
    <local:GreekGods x:Key="greekGods"/>
    <DataTemplate x:Key="itemTemplate">
        <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Name}" />
    </DataTemplate>
</Window.Resources>

<ListBox ItemsSource="{StaticResource greekGods}" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource itemTemplate}" Name="listBox"/>

The ItemsSource property of ListBox takes an IEnumerable, which is the list of items you want to display. In this case, the GreekGods data source is of type ObservableCollection, which implements IEnumerable. The ItemTemplate property specifies the DataTemplate that will be used to control how the data is displayed. In this case, we will have a TextBlock for each item that will display the GreekGod’s name.

Some of you might find surprising, however, that doing listBox.Items[i] in code returns the data we’re binding to, and not the TextBlock or the ListBoxItem. In my opinion, it is actually pretty cool that retrieving the data in a particular position of the list box is so easy, because most of the time this is exactly what you want.

GreekGod greekGod = (GreekGod)(listBox.Items[0]);

But what about when you want to have access to the actual ListBoxItem generated? This is a bit tricky to discover but can be just as easily done with the following code:

ListBoxItem lbi1 = (ListBoxItem)(listBox.ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromIndex(0));

There is also a listBox.ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromItem(object item) that returns the ListBoxItem given the corresponding data item. This method is frequently used, for example, to retrieve the ListBoxItem for the current item:

ListBoxItem lbi2 = (ListBoxItem)(listBox.ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromItem(listBox.Items.CurrentItem));

I will talk about selection and current item in detail in some other post, but for this sample it is sufficient to know that to keep the selection and current item in sync, I set IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem=”true” in the ListBox.

WPF Source Code

UWP/Uno Notes

There are a couple of changes to the code for UWP/Uno:

• Whilst the ListBox control still exists, it’s more common to use the ListView as it has a nice set of built in styles
• The listBox.Items collection doesn’t have a CurrentItem property. Instead we can use listBox.SelectedItem
• Attempting to set the IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem property on the ListView (or even ListBox) throws an exception and is generally not required since the SelectedItem property is in sync with what is selected in the ListView.

UWP/Uno Source Code

XAML Note
The structure of the XAML has been left the same from the original post. However, you should really avoid embedding a ListView or ListBox within a StackPanel. This layout will limit the ability of the view to resize without the button being pushed off screen.

Update 15th August 2020

Uno sample has been updated to v3 of Uno and supports iOS, Android, Windows and MacOS.

WinUI with Uno and WinUI for Desktop samples added.

WinUI with Uno and WinUI Desktop Source Code