ISerialized .Net, C#, Scrum and agile software development

Using the AutoCompleteBox in the WPF Toolkit

In this blog post I will look into the AutoCompleteBox in the WPF Toolkit, added in the february release of the WPF Toolkit. The AutoCompleteBox works, just the way I had expected it, but it actually adds a couple of more features than what I would have expected. Only one dll is needed to use the AutoCompleteBox:

System.Windows.Controls.Input.Toolkit

I will not describe all the features in details, only describe the basics of what you need to know to use it! To add a basic AutoCompleteBox, I just add the following line to my XAML:

<Controls:AutoCompleteBox Name="autocompleteBox" />

Once I have the user control in place, I can set ItemsSource and hence have the "predefined" values available:

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Windows;

namespace Autocomplete
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Interaction logic for Window1.xaml
    /// </summary>
    public partial class Window1 : Window
    {
        public Window1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            var mylist = new List<string>
                             {
                                 "Macedonia",
                                 "Madagascar",
                                 "Malawi",
                                 "Malaysia",
                                 "Maldives",
                                 "Mali",
                                 "Malta",
                                 "Marshall Islands",
                                 "Mauritania",
                                 "Mauritius",
                                 "Mexico",
                                 "Micronesia",
                                 "Moldova",
                                 "Monaco",
                                 "Mongolia",
                                 "Montenegro",
                                 "Morocco",
                                 "Mozambique",
                                 "Myanmar"
                             };
            autocompleteBox.ItemsSource = mylist;
        }
    }
}

Running my test project I see the following  behaviour:

There are basically just one more thing you need to notice about the AutoCompleteBox namely the FilterMode property. On my AutoCompleteBox I can set the filter mode to configure how the auto-complete values are picked. The following list is available at MSDN:

Thats basically all you need to know! In a real-life case I would of course add the ItemSource in the XAML binding it to a corresponding property in my ViewModel, but for simplicity I decided not to add it here just to keep my example as easy and clean as possible!