Spin Button in WPF

WPF SpinnerButton

As a part of Visual Studio 2010, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) does not have a Spin Button. A Spin Button is a control that has a value and by clicking up and down arrows, the value changes to the previous and next values.

The ButtonSpinner control comes with the WPF Toolkit Extended provides an alternative to a spin button. The WPF SpinnerButton control allows us to add a spinning feature to any element. This article demonstrates how to use the ButtonSpinner control in a WPF application using C# and XAML.

Adding Reference to WPF Toolkit Extended Assembly

The ButtonSpinner control is a part of the WPF Toolkit Extended and does not come with Visual Studio 2010. To use the ButtonSpinner control in your application, you must add reference to the WPFToolkit.Extended.dll assembly. You can download Extended WPF Tookit from the CodePlex or you can use the WPFToolkit.Extended.dll available with this download. All you need is the DLL. See Downloads section of this article. You can find more details in my blog Adding Reference to WPF Toolkit Extended.

Creating a ButtonSpinner

The ButtonSpinner control allows you to add a spinner button to any WPF element. A typical spinner button looks like Figure 1. The content area is used to display some content. The up and down arrow is used to move up and down.

Listing 1 creates a simple ButtonSpinner control. The Content property is used to display a value in the control.

<wpfx:ButtonSpinner Name="SpinButton" Margin="149,10,247,0" Height="30"

Content="10" />

Listing 1

The output of Listing 1 looks like Figure 1.

Figure 1

Spin Event

The Spin event is fired when the up and down arrows are clicked. Listing 2 creates a ButtonSpinner.

<wpfx:ButtonSpinner Name="SpinButton" Margin="149,10,247,0" Height="30"
Spin="SpinButton_Spin" Content="10"
FontFamily="Georgia" FontSize="16" FontWeight="Bold"
Foreground="Green" Background="Orange" />

Listing 2

Listing 2 creates Figure 5.

Figure 2

The Spin event is used to changing the value of the content part of the ButtonSpinner control. This content can be anything, a number, text or whatever else you want. Only thing you need to take care is, on the Spin event handler, set the value.

The code listed in Listing 3 reads the content of the control and converts it to an integer. The Direction property of the ButtonSpinner control decides if up or down arrow is clicked.

private void SpinButton_Spin(object sender, SpinEventArgs e)

{

ButtonSpinner spinner = (ButtonSpinner)sender;

string currentSpinValue = (string)spinner.Content;

int currentValue = String.IsNullOrEmpty(currentSpinValue) ? 0 : Convert.ToInt32(currentSpinValue);

if (e.Direction == SpinDirection.Increase)

currentValue++;

else

currentValue--;

spinner.Content = currentValue.ToString();

}

Listing 3

Summary

In this article, I discussed how we can use a ButtonSpinner control in a WPF application using C# and XAML.