ViewModelLocator

Starting with Catel 3.0, there are several ways to hook up a view model to the view. When a view is constructed, an MVVM behavior is added to the view. Thanks to these MVVM behaviors, it is possible to use exactly the same logic on 3rd party controls.

Note that the while using the conventions, magic words such as “View”, “Control”, “UserControl”, “Window” and “Page” will be stripped from the view name while locating the view model type

Resolving by naming convention

If the GetViewModelType method returns null (which is the default behavior), the view will resolve the IViewModelLocator from the ServiceLocator. Then it will use the ResolveViewModel method to resolve the view model based on the type of the view.

For example, the following view:

Catel.Examples.Views.MyView

will be resolved as:

Catel.Examples.ViewModels.MyViewModel

Manually resolving a view model using naming convention

To manually resolve a view model using naming convention, use the following code:

var viewModelLocator = ServiceLocator.Default.ResolveType<IViewModelLocator>();
var viewModelType = viewModelLocator.ResolveViewModel(typeof(MyView));

Customizing naming conventions

By default, the IViewModelLocator uses the following naming conventions to resolve view models:

For more information about naming conventions, see Naming conventions

However, it is possible to add or remove new naming conventions to support your own naming convention. For example, to add a new naming convention for a different assembly, use this code:

var viewModelLocator = ServiceLocator.Default.ResolveType<IViewModelLocator>();
viewModelLocator.NamingConventions.Add("MyCustomAssembly.ViewModels.[VW]ViewModel");

Registering custom view models

Sometimes, a class doesn’t follow a naming convention (for whatever reason possible). In such a case, it is possible to register a mapping manually using the following code:

var viewModelLocator = ServiceLocator.Default.ResolveType<IViewModelLocator>();
viewModelLocator.Register(typeof(MyViewNotFollowingNamingConvention), typeof(MyViewModel));

Using a custom ViewModelLocator

If you want to have total freedom to determine which view model is provided per view (maybe there are other services that have an impact on this), it is possible to create a custom IViewModelLocator implementation. Then the only thing to do is to register it using the following code:

ServiceLocator.Default.Register<IViewModelLocator, MyViewModelLocator>();

Using a generic implementation of the view

Last but not least, it is still possible to use the “old-fashioned” way by using the generic view bases. These classes directly derive from the non-generic views and return the generic type definition of the view model using the GetViewModelType method.


Contributions

We would like to thank the following contributors:

Want to contribute to the documentation? We have a guide for that!


Questions

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