Adding Custom Control Dynamically in LightSwitch

Prologue:

My previous article discussed how to bind the custom control to the screen property in a LightSwitch screen. In this article we shall see how to add the custom control dynamically to the LightSwitch screen.

We can take the LightSwitch demo application we created in part I of this article series. As we have discussed in part I, create a demo application with a custom control.

We have added the custom control, if you want to do something with the control; we need to access the custom control. So access the custom control as we discussed in this article.

So we have accessed the custom control, now we need to bind the control with the screen property [entity property], do this stuff as we did in the last article.

In this let us discuss how to add custom controls dynamically.

If you see the output of the article part I, the gender property is bound with the check box. So instead of displaying a check box we are trying to display the radio buttons to select male or female.

:

As shown in the above figure, change the Gender property type "Boolean" to "String".

Delete the Gender property from Screen:

As we are going to add the radio buttons instead of check box, delete the gender check box as shown in the figure.

Adding StackPanel to Screen:

We need to add a stack panel to the LightSwitch screen as a custom control to hold the radio buttons.


As shown in the above figure, just add the StackPanel control as we did for Button control.

Before accessing the StackPanel, we need to add the namespaces to the code-behind. So refer to the article part III to add the namespace.
 

Adding Radio Buttons Dynamically:

In the given following figure, we have added the radio buttons dynamically.

Here,

• We are getting the StackPanel control and setting the Orientation to Horizontal.
• We are creating two Radio buttons for male and female.
• Setting the content of the radio buttons as male and female respectively.
• If the user clicks on the male radio button, "Checked" event will be fired to set the Gender property to "Male".
• If the user clicks on the female radio button, "Checked" event will be fired to set the Gender property to "Female".
• Add the radio buttons to the StackPanel.

Complete Screen tree:

The following figure shows the complete screen tree for this article parts.


Hit F5 to see the application in action.

Application in Action:

You can see the male and female radio buttons added into the LightSwitch screen.

Summary:

In this article part IV, we have seen how to add a custom control dynamically to the LightSwitch screen.

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