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Jeff
795
binding column to complex collection
posted

I posted this to the WCF Data Service forum, but thought I would try here too since I'm using xamgrid.

I'm using silverlight to display objects retrieved from a WCF Data Service in a datagrid (i.e. the datagrid is being bound to a DataServiceCollection<GponOnt>).  My GponOnt object has a navigation property called GponOntLocations that contains all the locations the GponOnt serves.  I can of course bind directly to GponOntLocations and use a value converter to convert the collection of GponOntLocation objects to a string for display but in order to use all the filtering/grouping provided natively by the grid, it would be better if I bound the column to a simple "string" type instead of the collection.  Given that, I thought I would just use partial classes on the client side like:

  public partial class SrvStreetLocation
  {
    public override string ToString()
    {
      string addr = this.HouseNumber.Trim();

      if (AdrStreet != null)
      {
        addr = (addr + " " + this.AdrStreet.PreDirectional).Trim();
        addr = (addr + " " + this.AdrStreet.Street).Trim();
        addr = (addr + " " + this.AdrStreet.StreetSuffix).Trim();
      }

      addr = (addr + " " + this.Apartment).Trim();

      return addr;
    }
  }

  public partial class GponOnt
  {
    public string Locations
    {
      get
      {
        if (GponOntLocations != null)
        {
          return string.Join(",", (from l in GponOntLocations select l.SrvLocation.SrvStreetLocation.ToString()).ToArray());
        }
        else
        {
          return "";
        }
      }
    }
  }


This works great, but when I go to perform CRUD operations on the GponOnt objects and post them back to the server with SaveChanges, I of course get an error saying "property name 'Locations' is not valid.  I thought, simple , I'll just add a [NonMapped] or [NotSerialized] attribute to the above code but alas, I find the Silverlight version of the library doesn't support those.  Anyone know of an easy solution to make this synthetic property I've created not be serialized or an equivalent workaround?