Catel

Catel is an application development platform with the focus on MVVM (WPF).

The goal of Catel is to provide a complete set of modular functionality for Line of Business applications written in any .NET technology, from client to server.

Major features

Below are a few major features that are available in Catel.

Catel.Core

Catel.Core is the library you want to include in all your projects, whether you are writing a UI project or not. It contains lots of useful helper methods. The most important features are listed below:

• Argument validation (e.g. Argument.IsNotNull(() => myArgument))
• Caching
• Data (ModelBase, PropertyBag, Validation)
• Messaging
• Weak references (WeakEventListener)

And more….

Catel.MVVM

Catel.MVVM is the library you want to include when you are writing a WPF UI projec and you want to use the MVVM pattern. Catel is the only MVVM library that has context-aware view and view-model creation, which can be used to solve the nested user controls problem.

The most important features are listed below:

• Auditing
• Collections (FastObservableCollection, FastObservableDictionary, etc)
• Commands (Command, TaskCommand, etc)
• Converters (tons of converters out of the box)
• Services
  • BusyIndicatorService
  • MessageService
  • NavigationService
  • OpenFileService
  • SaveFileService
  • UIVisualizerService
• View models
  • Automatic validation
  • Automatic mappings from model to view model
• Views
  • DataWindow
  • UserControl
  • Window

Example code

Models

This model has automatic change notifications and validation.

public class Person : ValidatableModelBase
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }

    public string LastName { get; set; }

    protected override void ValidateFields(List<IFieldValidationResult> validationResults)
    {
        if (string.IsNullOrWhitespace(FirstName))
        {
            validationResults.Add(FieldValidationResult.CreateError(nameof(FirstName), "First name is required"));
        }

        if (string.IsNullOrWhitespace(LastName))
        {
            validationResults.Add(FieldValidationResult.CreateError(nameof(LastName), "Last name is required"));
        }
    }    
}

View models

This is a view model with:

• Automatic injection of the DataContext
• Automatic mapping of properties & validation from model => view model

public class PersonViewModel : ViewModelBase
{
    public PersonViewModel(Person person)
    {
        Argument.IsNotNull(() => person);

        Person = person;
    }

    [Model]
    private Person Person { get; set; }

    [ViewModelToModel]
    public string FirstName { get; set; }

    [ViewModelToModel]
    public string LastName { get; set; }
}

Continue reading

Introduction

FAQ

Setup, deployment & projects

Getting started

Examples

Catel.Core

Catel.MVVM

Catel.Fody

Tips & tricks

footer

header