Windows Tile Updater (Part 7 - Multibinding command parameters)

We left the last post where the Tile Updater could update text, or images, but we basically had to choose which at design time. In this post, I’m going to pass through the image and text, and have the command work out which to update.

Note: you can have both image and text in live tiles. Look out for that in a future post.

Multibinding

The first thing to know about multibinding for WinRT is that it doesn’t exist. However, to get around this, we can simply take the same approach that we do with a function - a function can only return one value, but that value can be a class; so we’ll bind to the VM (one of the advantages of exposing a static singleton instance of the VM):

[sourcecode language=“XML”] Update

The command itself needs to look something like this for now:

``` csharp

        public bool CanExecute(object parameter)
        {
            MainViewModel mvmInst = (MainViewModel)parameter;
            if (mvmInst == null) return false;

            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(mvmInst.ImagePath) && string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(mvmInst.DisplayText))
                return false;
            return true;
        }

        public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged;

        public void Execute(object parameter)
        {
            MainViewModel mvmInst = (MainViewModel)parameter;

            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(mvmInst.ImagePath))
                TileUpdater.Model.UpdateTile.UpdateTileText(mvmInst.DisplayText);
            else
                TileUpdater.Model.UpdateTile.UpdateTileImage(mvmInst.ImagePath);
        }

There’s a couple of points here: 1. The CanExecute will not prevent the command from firing where neither parameter has a value. 2. It doesn’t disable the button when this occurs.

And that’s it - we now have a command that can accept multiple parameters and update either image or text depending on what is displayed.

Conclusion

Okay, strictly speaking, this is not multi-binding. It does however, solve the problem. I suppose the design question would be: does it introduce a tighter coupling than multi-binding?

It definitely does; however, with a bit of manipulation, you could introduce a mini-VM that just had the parameters that you need. However, for most cases, I would think that it was fine to just pass the VM to the command. We’ll see if this comes back to bite me when we start putting some unit tests in place.