How to preserve the full state of the View when navigating between Views in an MVVM application?

Question

I have an MVVM application that requires basic backward/forward navigation between screens. Currently, I have implemented this using a WorkspaceHostViewModel that tracks the

Answer 1

I may be missing the point, but any important view state could (or maybe even should) be stored in the ViewModel. It kind of depends on how much there is, and how dirty you are willing to get.

If that's not palatable (from a purist perspective it may not sit with what you're doing), you could bind those not-quite-VM-able parts of the view it to a separate class containing the state (call them ViewState classes perhaps?).

If they truly are view-only properties and you don't want to take either of those routes, then they are where they belong, in the view. You should instead work out a way of not recreating the view each time: use a factory rather than built-in datatemplating, for example. If you go the DataTemplateSelector you get to return a template I believe, perhaps there's a way to re-use instances of the view there? (I would have to check..)