When Clearing an ObservableCollection, There are No Items in e.OldItems

Question

I have something here that is really catching me off guard.

I have an ObservableCollection of T that is filled with items. I also have an event handler attached to t

Answer 1

Well, I decided to get dirty with it myself.

Microsoft put a LOT of work into always making sure the NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs doesn't have any data when calling a reset. I'm assuming this was a performance/memory decision. If you are resetting a collection with 100,000 elements, I'm assuming they didn't want to duplicate all those elements.

But seeing as my collections never have more then 100 elements, I don't see a problem with it.

Anyway I created an inherited class with the following method:

protected override void ClearItems()
{
    CheckReentrancy();
    List oldItems = new List(Items);

    Items.Clear();

    OnPropertyChanged(new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Count"));
    OnPropertyChanged(new PropertyChangedEventArgs("Item[]"));

    NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs e =
        new NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs
        (
            NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Reset
        );

        FieldInfo field =
            e.GetType().GetField
            (
                "_oldItems",
                BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.NonPublic
            );
        field.SetValue(e, oldItems);

        OnCollectionChanged(e);
    }