Hello,
I have been examining the Telerik source code and notice several anti-patterns related to automation peers. For several controls, the automation peers have function overrides that return unhelpful strings. One example is the RadGridViewAutomationPeer GetHelpTextCore method returns "RadGridView". Because of this, it's impossible to set help text for individual grids in XAML which is the default behavior of the GridViewDataControlAutomationPeer. Even though the RadGridViewAutomationPeer can be inherited from and its GetHelpTextCore method modified, not all Telerik automation peers are overridable. GridViewCell and GridViewRow for example require internally scoped properties and can't be overridden.
Right now I am able to bypass these issues by making the changes to the source code and recompiling it, but this is not a long term sustainable solution. Does Telerik have any sort of road map available for addressing automation peer issues?
2 Answers, 1 is accepted
Thank you for reporting this.
We're already aware of this limitation (the feedback item for which you can follow here) and have already introduced the AutomationManager.UseDefaultHelpText property with our R1 2019 SP1 release. As stated in the feedback item, we've already implemented this in a few of our assemblies, including Telerik.Windows.Controls.GridView and its RadGridView, GridViewRow and GridViewCell peers.
By default, this property's value is True, meaning that the automation peers of the controls will return a predefined string (the class name as you have already come across) as HelpText. By setting this property to False, however, the AutomationProperties.HelpText of the control will be used instead.
I hope you find this information helpful and that you will be able to upgrade your project to the aforementioned version of the suite. Please let me know whether this is the case.
Regards,
Dilyan Traykov
Progress Telerik
Rank 1