EnumValuesExtension.md

title	author	description	keywords
EnumValuesExtensions	Sergio0694	A markup extension that returns a collection of values of a specific enum type.	windows 10, uwp, uwp community toolkit, uwp toolkit, markup extension, XAML, markup, enum

EnumValuesExtensions

The EnumValuesExtensions type implements a markup extension that returns a collection of values of a specific enum type. It can be useful to easily bind a collection of all possible values from a given enum type to a UI element such as a ComboBox or some other items container or selector control.

Platform APIs: EnumValuesExtensions

Syntax

Assuming we had an Animal enum type and we wanted the user to pick one of the available names, here is the XAML syntax that allows us to create a ComboBox and display all Animal values, directly from XAML and with no code-behind:

<ComboBox
    xmlns:ui="using:Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI"
    xmlns:enums="using:MyApplication.Enums"
    ItemsSource="{ui:EnumValues Type=enums:Animal}"
    SelectedIndex="0"/>

In this example we're just relying on the default ComboBox item template, that will display the name of each Animal value in a TextBlock control. We could of course also define a custom item template if we wanted to show additional info for each individual Animal value, or if we wanted to further customize how each value is presented to the user.

Examples

Binding to an enum property can be accomplished like so:

<ComboBox
    xmlns:ui="using:Microsoft.Toolkit.Uwp.UI"
    xmlns:enums="using:MyApplication.Enums"
    ItemsSource="{ui:EnumValues Type=enums:Animal}"
    SelectedItem="{x:Bind SelectedAnimal, Mode=OneWay}" />

private Animal selectedAnimal = Animal.Dog;

public Animal SelectedAnimal
{
    get => selectedAnimal;
    set
    {
        selectedAnimal = value;
        OnPropertyChanged(nameof(SelectedAnimal));
    }
}

You can find more examples in the unit tests.