Using Value Converters - Page 1
       by kirupa  |  29 July 2007

In the previous page, you took the value converter you created and modified our data binding to use it. The end result is that your application now works well! For the past few pages, we quickly ran through the details hoping to get our data binding working. In this page, let's take a step back and look at the code found in our value converter.

Revisiting StringToBrush.cs
You copied and pasted much of the code that went into our StringToBrush file. Let's look at each line and see what it does:

class StringToBrush : IValueConverter

In this line, I define my StringToBrush class. More importantly, I am implementing our IValueConverter interface. In a nutshell, an interface defines a contract. The contract specifies details such as the number of methods and what arguments each of your methods will take. The interface itself contains no code beyond just defining the methods and their arguments.

Our IValueConverter specifies the Convert and ConvertBack methods. Like you saw in this tutorial, with Visual Studio, once you simply specify an interface to implement, the required methods are created for you automatically.

if (value != null)

{

string input = value.ToString();

 

if (input.Length != 6)

{

throw new Exception("String doesn't seem to be a valid RGB hex color");

}

 

Color newColor = (Color)ColorConverter.ConvertFromString("#" + input);

 

SolidColorBrush colorBrush = new SolidColorBrush(newColor);

return colorBrush;

}

else

{

return new SolidColorBrush(Colors.White);

}

In our Convert method, the first thing I check is to make sure our value variable is not null. The value variable is important because it stores the data that is passed in to our value converter. If our value variable itself is null, that means that no data was passed in.

To avoid having our application spectacularly crash and burn, I return a default SolidColorBrush in our else statement in the rare scenario when value does equal null.

All of the following code runs when our value is not null (value != null) condition holds.

string input = value.ToString();

With this line, I create a new object called input, and it stores the string version of our value object. Our value object is actually given to us as a type object, and to avoid any issues associated with having a generic object, I convert it to a string to better deal with our data.

if (input.Length != 6)

{

throw new Exception("String doesn't seem to be a valid RGB hex color");

}

In this line, I make one more check to make sure our input is valid. In this case, I check to make sure that our provided value is six-digits long. If the provided value is not six digits long, then I throw an exception. I agree this is a naive way to check whether an input is a good hex value candidate, but for this tutorial, it does the trick.

Color newColor = (Color)ColorConverter.ConvertFromString("#" + input);

This line essentially fixes the shortcoming that led to us creating our value converter. More specifically, in this line, I create and initialize our new Color objec using the ColorConverter object's ConvertFromString method. The ConvertFromString method allows me to take our 6-digit hex input and combine it with the missing # character.

After this line executes, our newColor object successfully took our incompatible hex code and with the simple string manipulation, stores the color in a form that WPF can understand.

SolidColorBrush colorBrush = new SolidColorBrush(newColor);

return colorBrush;

We wrap up the work we started in the previous line with these two lines. I take the new Color object and create a SolidColorBrush out of it. The reason is that our window's Background property primarily deals with brushes, so it makes sense to return our new color as a SolidColorBrush.

And with that, you are done with this value converter tutorial.

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