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I'm trying to serialize a custom WPF user control that features a grid with a textblock that is bound to a dependency property named "Frequency". The snippet that defines the textblock is as follows (the definition of the user control is quite lengthy to post it here!):

<TextBlock x:Name="FrequencyText" Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Grid.ColumnSpan="2"
                               FontFamily="Arial Rounded MT"
                               Foreground="White" FontSize="10" FontWeight="DemiBold" Margin="3"
                               TextBlock.Text="{Binding Frequency, ElementName=FrequencyButtonControlA, Path=Frequency}"
                               TextAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Left" />

I'm working on an editor tool that enables the user to arrange some custom controls into a canvas and change their properties and I need to provide the user with the capability to clone an existing element. In order to do this, I'm serializing the control into an XElement and instantiating a new one afterwards. The code to perform the serialization is as follows:

var contentXaml = (commsPanelItem.Content != null) ? XamlWriter.Save(commsPanelItem.Content) : string.Empty;
var serializedItem = new XElement(
"CommsPanelItem",
new XElement("Type", commsPanelItem.GetType().ToString()),
new XElement("Left", Canvas.GetLeft(commsPanelItem.UIElement)),
new XElement("Top", Canvas.GetTop(commsPanelItem.UIElement)),
new XElement("Width", commsPanelItem.Width),
new XElement("Height", commsPanelItem.Height),
new XElement("zIndex", Panel.GetZIndex(commsPanelItem.UIElement)),
new XElement("Content", contentXaml),
commsPanelItem.GetAttributesForSavingPanelInConfigurator() as XElement);
return serializedItem;

The problem I'm having is that, when serializing the textblock, the "Text" field doesn't preserve the binding to the "Frequency" dependency property, it just gets exported with the value assigned by the user ("131.5" in the following example):

TextBlock Text="131.5" FontFamily="Arial Rounded MT" FontWeight="SemiBold" FontSize="10" Foreground="#FFFFFFFF" TextAlignment="Center" Name="FrequencyText" Margin="3,3,3,3" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Center" Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="1" Grid.ColumnSpan="2"

My question is: is there any way to be able to serialize dependency property's binding instead of the actual value?

Thanks in advance!

Nacho1984
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1 Answers1

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Use the "GetBinding" method found on FrameworkElements instead of pulling its value:

BindingExpression bindingExpression = myTextBox.GetBindingExpression(TextBox.TextProperty);

Then you can probably serialize the BindingExpression.

Joe
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