WPF DatePicker Using C#

WPF DatePicker Control

A DatePicker control is used to create a visual DatePicker that let user to pick a date and fire an event on the selection of the date. This article demonstrates how to create and use a DatePicker control in WPF with the help of XAML and C#.

Creating a DatePicker

The DatePicker element represents a WPF DatePicker control in XAML.

The DatePicker control is defined in the System.Windows.Controls namespace. When you drag and drop a DatePicker control from Toolbox to the page, you will notice the code listed in Listing 1 is added to the XAML file for the DatePicker control.

Listing 1

The Width and Height attributes of the DatePicker element represent the width and the height of a DatePicker. The Content attribute represents the text of a DatePicker. The Name attribute represents the name of the control, which is a unique identifier of a control.

When you run this code, you will see a TextBox with text Select a date and when you click on this TextBox or the date, Calendar dropdown will appear where you can select a date. The selected date will be the date in the TextBox as you can see in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Display Date

The DisplayDate property represents the date to display. The default is today.

IsDropDownOpen

The IsDropDownOpen property indicates if the calendar part of the DatePicker control is open or closed.

Text Property

The Text property represents the text that is displayed in the DatePicker.

Selection Date and Selection Date Format

The SelectedDate property represents the currently selected date. If multiple dates selection is true, the SelectedDates property represents a collection of currently selected dates.

BlackoutDates

The BlackoutDates property of the DatePicker class represents a collection of dates that are not available for selection. All non selection dates are marked by a cross. For example, say in March month of year 2010, we would like to block dates from Jan 1^st to Jan 7^th and then all Sundays and the final DatePicker should look like Figure 2.

Figure 2

The following code snippet adds backout dates to a DatePicker.

We can achieve this by adding code listed in Listing 2. As you can see from Listing 3, the BlackoutDates.Add method takes a CalendarDateRange object, which is a collection of two DateTime objects. The first date is the start date of the range and second date is the end date of the date range.

DisplayDateStart and DisplayDateEnd

The DatePicker control allows you to set the start and end display dates by using the DisplayDateStart and DisplayDateEnd properties. If you see Figure 2 in the previous section, you may notice the March 2010 month DatePicker display start with March 01, 2010 date. But now what if you want to display dates for March 2010 month only? We can use the DisplayStartDate and DisplayEndDate properties to control the start and end dates of a month.

DisplayDate property represents the current date to display.

The following code snippet sets the DisplayDate, DisplayDateStart and DisplayDateEnd attributes of DatePicker element in XAML.

The code listed in Listing 3 makes sure the start date is March 01, 2010 and end date is March 31, 2010. The current selected date is March 05.

The new DatePicker looks like Figure 3.

Figure 3

FirstDayOfWeek and IsTodayHighlighted

By default, Sunday is the first day of week. If you would like to change it, you use FirstDayOfWeek property. The IsTodayHightlighted property is used to make today highlighted.

The following code snippet sets the FirstDayOfWeek to Tuesday and makes today highlighted.

The following code snippet sets the FirstDayOfWeek to Tuesday and makes today highlighted in WPF.

The new DatePicker looks like Figure 4, where you can see the start day of the week us Tuesday.

Figure 4

Selected Date and Selected Dates

SelectedDate property represents the current selected date. If multiple date selection is true, then SelectedDates property represents all selected dates in a DatePicker. The following code snippet sets the SelectedDates in XAML at design-time.