I was doing some work with Silverlight the other week which involved using UserControls where the control named itself. That is, a situation such as;

<UserControl x:Name=”foo”>

<!—Content of control –>

</UserControl>

and, under unpredictable circumstances I was finding that I kept hitting a semi-random error when running my code which was something along the lines of;

“The name already exists in the tree: foo”

I spent an awfully long time on this and hence the blog post to try and perhaps save you some time in the future. I took long enough on it to come up with a simple repro scenario which looks something like this;



and so in words I have a ListBox which displays instances of UserControl1 and that control is just a StackPanel which contains 2 instances of UserControl2 and that control happens to name itself in its definition.

I found that if I ran this application a few times then sometimes it would work fine and sometimes it would fail with the dreaded exception and so I asked internally whether that was expected and it was confirmed as a bug in the Silverlight 4 runtime which has been fixed in Silverlight 5.

In my particular case, I could work around the bug anyway because I was naming that user control in order to use it for some bindings and the workaround I used was to create those bindings from code instead.

Lets start by updating the Code Behind of the Mainage.xaml .

Step 1:

Add a event handler for RowEditEnded .

This would give me the updated values of the Row . With this I would be able to update the update the cell and commit it. This event would help me trace the updated values . This event handler is to be added in the constrcutor of the Mainpage.xaml .

articleDataGrid.RowEditEnded += new EventHandler<DataGridRowEditEndedEventArgs>(articleDataGrid_RowEditEnded);

Step 2:

Implement the event handler for RowEditEnded .

I simply put the code to update the article and saving the context in the block .

void articleDataGrid_RowEditEnded(object sender, DataGridRowEditEndedEventArgs e)
{
    try
    {
        if (e.EditAction == DataGridEditAction.Commit)
        {

            articleId = ((Article)e.Row.DataContext).ArticleID;

            Article art = (from article in context.Articles
                          where article.ArticleID == articleId
                          select article).First();

            art.ArticleID = ((Article)e.Row.DataContext).ArticleID;
            art.AuthorID = ((Article)e.Row.DataContext).AuthorID;
            art.Body = ((Article)e.Row.DataContext).Body;
            art.Title = ((Article)e.Row.DataContext).Title;

            context.SubmitChanges();

            MessageBox.Show("Article was sucessfully Updated"); 

        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        MessageBox.Show("Updating Article failed :" + ex.Message);
    }

}

Step 3 :

Make sure you load the context in the Constructor of the MainPage class .

context.Load(context.GetArticlesQuery());

We are done. Run the App. Modify the Body or the Title . The Field would be sucessfully updated .

So we are done with Updation . I still need to add the validation to this .

Lets add validation then .

For this example we will go for basic validation . Just go ahead and add a Required attribute to the Domainservice Metadata that was generated .

Your Final Metadata class (DataDomainService.metadata.cs ) would look like as follows :

DataDomainService.metadata.cs

namespace SL2wayWCFRia.Web
{
    using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.ComponentModel;
    using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;
    using System.Linq;
    using System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting;
    using System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Server;

    // The MetadataTypeAttribute identifies ArticleMetadata as the class
    // that carries additional metadata for the Article class.
    [MetadataTypeAttribute(typeof(Article.ArticleMetadata))]
    public partial class Article
    {
 
        // This class allows you to attach custom attributes to properties
        // of the Article class.
        //
        // For example, the following marks the Xyz property as a
        // required property and specifies the format for valid values:
        //    [Required]
        //    [RegularExpression("[A-Z][A-Za-z0-9]*")]
        //    [StringLength(32)]
        //    public string Xyz { get; set; }
        internal sealed class ArticleMetadata
        {

            // Metadata classes are not meant to be instantiated.
            private ArticleMetadata()
            {
            }

            [Required]
            public int ArticleID { get; set; }

            [Required]|
            public Nullable<int> AuthorID { get; set; }

            [Required]
            public string Body { get; set; }

            [Required]
            public string Title { get; set; }
        }
    }
}

Now give it a run .

Make the AuthorId field empty and press tab to move to the next field you would get a message as shown below :