Data Binding in Silverlight with RIA and EntityFramework (Displaying Data)

In Data Driven application a lot revolves around the data source either in the form of a Database, XML or any other source. In my previous posts I think I was able to give a fair bit of introduction on how to create a data model using EnityFramework and RIA services. This post covers up to the displaying of the data in the UI.

Concept of Binding in Silverlight

To proceed further with this post I guess you may need to have some basic concept of what binding is. May be writing in detail about this concept will be repetitive so I suggest that you go through this article from MSDN which is a complete learning resource on the subject.

A Real World Scenario

Here I am going to explain a real application scenario of Master/Detail based data, where the information regarding master will be shown to the detail.

Project and Data Model Setup

Create a Silverlight Project with RIA service enabled and add Data Model using Entity Framework. The detailed steps are described in this earlier post. Here the "DataModel_SOI.edmx" Model container shows up the mapped properties to the scalar data fields.The "DomainService_SOI" service class will take care of server side querying.

Binding approach

Well the binding approach is quite straight forward, we will bind the the state entity collection to the list box while loading of the page. Although the we never intend to show the data in a State 1 Stae 2 … format, we will assign a DisplayMember of the entity. The next step is to attach the selected List box item to the Grid layout control which is above the Visual Tree of the controls used for detailing. Once the selected state entity is attached to the Grid Layout the properties can be used directly to the controls.

Binding to the State List Box