How to set a value to display for bound properties in WPF design mode?

Question

My bound contents are showed as empty string in the UI design-mode. I want to display some faked value for those contents but I don\'t know how to.

Plea

Answer 1

An easy way to get Design-time-data in Visual Studio 2010 is to use a design-datacontext. Short example with a Window and a ViewModel, For DataContext, the d:DataContext will be used in Design-mode and the StaticResource will be used in runtime. You can also use a separate ViewModel for design but in this example I will use the same ViewModel for both.

And in the ViewModels property MyText we check if we're in design mode and in that case we return something else.

public class MyViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
    public MyViewModel()
    {
        MyText = "Runtime-Text";
    }

    private string m_myText;
    public string MyText
    {
        get
        {
            // Or you can use
            // DesignerProperties.GetIsInDesignMode(this)
            if (Designer.IsDesignMode)
            {
                return "Design-Text";
            }
            return m_myText;
        }
        set
        {
            m_myText = value;
            OnPropertyChanged("MyText");
        }
    }
    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
    private void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName)
    {
        if (PropertyChanged != null)
        {
            PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
        }
    }
}

Designer.cs, which is found here, looks like this

public static class Designer
{
    private static readonly bool isDesignMode;
    public static bool IsDesignMode
    {
        get { return isDesignMode; }
    }
    static Designer()
    {
        DependencyProperty prop =
            DesignerProperties.IsInDesignModeProperty;
        isDesignMode =
            (bool)DependencyPropertyDescriptor.
                FromProperty(prop, typeof(FrameworkElement))
                      .Metadata.DefaultValue;
    }
}