Dude, where is my Kaizen?

Björn Rochel's weblog

With new technologies often completely new patterns emerge as people try to check-out how far a technology might take them. One interesting example for this is the Attached Behavior Pattern which seems to get a lot of attention in the WPF and Silverlight community lately. It’s a great example of what you can do with those technologies that was previously only very hard to achieve (although sometimes in my calm moments it feels a little bit like a hack to me).

Anyway, here is what the pattern actually does:

The Attached Behavior Pattern uses the moment when an attached DependencyProperty is attached to a DependencyObject in order to wire event handlers to it. With this you’re able to extend the behavior of elements in the WPF trees with arbitrary code.

Let’s take a look at how this can be achieved. First of all we need a class deriving from DependencyObject in order to be able to provide an attached DependencyProperty. It uses the standard pattern of registering the IsEnabled DependencyProperty in the static constructor (which is a bit clunky, btw).

    public class MyBehavior : DependencyObject
    {
        public static readonly DependencyProperty IsEnabledProperty;

        static MyBehavior ()
        {
            IsEnabledProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached(
                "IsEnabled", //Name of the property
                typeof(bool),//Type of the attached property
                typeof(MyBehavior),//Type of the class that provides the property
                new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(false)); //Default value
        }

        public bool IsEnabled
        {
            get { return this.GetValue<bool>(IsEnabledProperty); }
            set { SetValue(IsEnabledProperty, value); }
        }
    }

Pretty standard stuff so far. However you can use another constructor of FrameworkPropertyMetdata in order to supply a callback which is called when the value of the attached property changes.

	IsEnabledProperty = DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached(
                "IsEnabled", //Name of the property
                typeof(bool),//Type of the attached property
                typeof(MyBehavior),//Type of the class that provides the property
                new FrameworkPropertyMetadata(false, OnBehaviorEnabled)); //Default value + Callback

Next thing we need to do is to configure this attached property on the DependencyObject we want to attach behavior to. This is preferably done in XAML. You’ve got at least two options for doing the configuration. The first option is to set your attached property in the XAML file of a UserControl, Page or Window directly at the source, the element you want to attach behavior to.

<TextBox myNamespace:MyBehavior.IsEnabled="true" />

The other option is to use the the power of styles (an area were WPF really shines imho) in order to set it for all elements to which a style is applied.

 <Style TargetType="TextBox">
        <Setter Property="myNamespace:MyBehavior.IsEnabled" Value="true" />
 </Style>

Personally I very much vote for the second option, because it enables you to specify the attached behavior in a single place in contrast to configuring it at several places in your solution. Don’t repeat yourself, unless you really need to.

Now, fasten your seatbelts. This is were the fun begins. When the WPF / Silverlight infrastructure loads the compiled baml from the resources and builds the element tree from it (and with this attaches our new property to the specified elements) the callback method gets called.

        private static void OnBehaviorEnabled(
            DependencyObject dependencyObject,
            DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs args)
        {
            TextBox textBox = (TextBox)dependencyObject;

            textBox.LostFocus += (s,e) =>
            {
	          //Put your little piece of magic here
            };

        }
    }

With first parameter of the callback you get a reference to the DependencyObject to which our attached property has been attached to. You’re now able to wire all sort of event handlers to the DependencyObject and are able to execute arbitrary code when the event occurs.

Here ends our journey for today. Attached Behaviors is a really nice technique which enabled me to do something that I always wanted to have in my WinForms apps but never found a satisfiing way to implement it (just a bit patience, I’m going to blog about it soon). I think it will be interesting to see
how this pattern is used in the future. While new patterns always have the tendency to be overused, I think that this particular pattern can enable lots of valuable things . . .