development adventures

Using the new WPF Ribbon with CompositeWPF

When using the new WPF Ribbon CTP with CompositeWPF (aka Prism), you probably want your modules to fill the ribbon with tabs. To let modules add content to your shell window, you have to mark the designated areas as Region.When trying to add a Region name to the ribbon with some xaml code like this :

<r:Ribbon cal:RegionManager.RegionName="ApplicationRibbon"> ....</r:Ribbon>

you will get a KeyNotFoundException.
Diving a little bit deeper shows you that the RegionManager cannot find a RegionAdapter mapping for Microsoft.Windows.Controls.Ribbon.Ribbon.That means that we have to write a RegionAdapter for the Ribbon Control.Implementing IRegionAdapter should suffice but as we are lazy, we could just inherit from RegionAdapterBase<T> (where our T will be Ribbon) and we will end up with something short like this:

 public class RibbonRegionAdapter : RegionAdapterBase<Ribbon>
    {
        protected override void Adapt(IRegion region, Ribbon regionTarget)
        {
            region.Views.CollectionChanged += delegate {
                foreach (var tab in region.Views.Cast<RibbonTab>())
                {
                    if (!regionTarget.Tabs.Contains(tab))
                    {
                        regionTarget.Tabs.Add(tab);
                    }
                }
            };
        }

        protected override IRegion CreateRegion()
        {
            return new SingleActiveRegion();
        }
    }

at least we have to Register this RegionAdapter in our bootstrapper. Therefore we just override the Bootstrapper’s ConfigureRegionAdapterMapping’s method:

protected override RegionAdapterMappings ConfigureRegionAdapterMappings()
        {
            var mappings = Container.TryResolve<RegionAdapterMappings>();
            if (mappings != null)
            {
                mappings.RegisterMapping(typeof(Ribbon), new RibbonRegionAdapter());
            }
            return mappings;
        }

Now we should be able to add RibbonTab’s to the ribbon from within our Modules using RegionManager (we can easily resolve this from our IoC Container).

This is no full featured quality guide for using the Wpf Ribbon control with CompositeWpf. It just shows that writing custom region adapters is actually quite an easy thing.