Search box to quickly navigate to menus in WPF application

Ravi P

6y811

Hi,

We have a huge WPF application developed for many years, which has lot of menus like menu buttons, ribbon menu buttons, toggle menu buttons, contextual ribbon menus etc. Since there are lot of menus, providing search box on the top to quickly navigate to the menus/settings will benefit the users lot. I am expecting something similar to Search Box ( ctrl + Q ) in the top menu area of Visual studio or any other better solution. I have been thinking a manual solution that go over all the xaml files during application launch and parse, collect all menu text and its action etc, so this collection will be searched and action will be invoked something like that, but is there any framework / API readily available or any other solution to implement this functionality?

Thanks
Ravi.

3 Replies

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Junaid Musla6y ago
One of the way would be as stated below;

On login, create a collection of all the menu items which you need to add to quick search.
The collection class will have below possible properties:
public string MenuName { get; set; }   // Name to ne displayed in quick search.
public string ToolTip { get; set; }  // if required.
public string NavigationType { get; set; } // if required (tab or popup).
public string ViewName { get; set; }  // The view to which navigation is to be done.
public string Icon { get; set; }     // if any icon used for tab.
Use lookup control to bind this collection. When user enters a search keyword, respective records from the collection will be displayed. On selection change, execute an action which will perform the task of navigation to the selected menu option.

Thats it. Hope this will be helpful.
Ravi P6y ago
There is no database involved. Everthing is in XAML file.
Junaid Musla6y ago
Hello,

I would like to know if your menu is Database driven or not ?