Controls inside a user control are null, why?? Any workaround?

[Pinho]

Hi,

 we developed a sort of wizard control that allows user to create an object with the information collect during the wizard "life".

 It's a standard Silverlight user control, with a grid as a container. The developer just have to define the pages and the objects that go within those pages.

 Now, we are facing a big problem, when we try to access the objects, they're always null :(

 We improved the FindByName to overcome this (based on the example of the VisualTreeWalker), we get the object on run-time by name, we create a "proxy" in development time, and work with these proxies instead of working with the controls directly.

 This is a major pain, we have pages with 20 controls and we have to create 20 temporary objects. Just to get the text defined in a text box we have to:

Create a proxy like: TextBox textBoxNameInternal;
Then get the instance:  textBoxNameInternal = VisualTreeWalker.FindName<TextBox>("textBoxName", gridPage);
Only then we can do: textBoxNameInternal.Text;

Imagine this multiplied by several wizards, by several controls on each wizard page and you can imagine how this can delay the development. :(

Did any of you have ever faced a similar problem? Did you manage to overcome this?

Thanks,

L. Pinho

[Vlad]

Hi Luis,

I'm not sure about VisualTreeWalker however I've attached small example demonstrating how to use our own extension methods.

Let me know what you think.

Sincerely yours,
Vlad
the Telerik team

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