Showing a modal dialog with custom content in LightSwitch.

There’s probably nothing easier than creating a modal dialog in LightSwitch.

(Note to self: bad intro… Perhaps 99% of the LightSwitch framework is even easier. It’s just such an easy to use framework as a whole, and most of it doesn’t even require writing code!!)

Still, to save you some time if you want to create a modal dialog, here’s the 1.2.3:

1. In your client project, switch to content view, and add a new Silverlight UserControl (mine is called “ViewNewMessageWindow).

2. Instead of inheriting UserControl, change the declaration so that your class inherits: “Microsoft.LightSwitch.Runtime.Shell.Framework.ScreenChildWindow.

 public partial class ViewNewMessageWindow : Microsoft.LightSwitch.Runtime.Shell.Framework.ScreenChildWindow
    {
        public ViewNewMessageWindow()
        {
            this.InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void OKButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            this.DialogResult = true;
        }
    }

Don’t forget to change the XAML declarations as well…

<shellUtils:ScreenChildWindow x:Class="MessagesExtension.Client.ViewNewMessageWindow"
           xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
           xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
           xmlns:shellUtils ="clr-namespace:Microsoft.LightSwitch.Runtime.Shell.Framework;assembly=Microsoft.LightSwitch.Client" >

And the last step:  anywhere in your client code, create a new instance of your class and call the Show method:

            (new ViewNewMessageWindow()).Show(null, null);

Showing a modal popup in my application.

See how the LightSwitch framework nicely disables the entire application (it’s slightly grayed out), so that you have to respond to my modal dialog first?  You can pass null as a first argument, or an IScreenObject.  The first should make your window modal to your entire application, the second only to the actual IScreenObject.  (Emphasis on the “should”, the documentation says it will, but during my tests that wasn’t always the case…)

By the way, have a look at the screenshot above.  Notice the custom command group (Messages) in the ribbonbar?  That will be my next post, but to avoid making that post too bloaty, I extracted the part about modal dialogs here… Forgive me if this post was way too easy on your eyes, I won’t do it again.

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