Unbound InfoWindow?

Question

I'm developing a tool that would allow a user to click any location on the map, popup a new window, fill in some simple information, then save this information to the database. The end table where this information will be written is not a spatial table, it will just be a table of XY coordinates, user id and comments entered by the user. Easy enough, but then the next requirement is to display the data entry form in an InfoWindow so it appears as a callout next to the clicked location. I tried to do this with an InfoWindow DataTemplate, but it appears that InfoWindows (or DataTemplates) will only display correctly if they are bound to data? Specifically, the InfoWindow won't resize to fit all of my controls, just 2 TextBlocks, 2 TextBoxes and a button. I'd rather not use the editing framework since this is not a spatial table, just a simple non-spatial table. Any suggestions?

DominiqueBroux · Answer

When your datatemplate is in a resource file, there is no reasonable location to put the event handler. The xamlreader doesn't have the context to understand where to wire those things up and that eventually crashes.

A couple of options to overcome that:* put your resources in your control (instead of in the application)
* bind to a command and add this command in your view model
* subclass the InfoWindow class and add your command in that class

AnastasiaAourik · Answer

Jennifer: A few threads up you talked about infowindow and showed how you set th InfoWindow.ContentTemplate in the code behind. This is shown in the sample: http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/samples/start.htm#InfoWindowSimple My situation is that I will have about 25 unique templates depending on the layer that the infowindow is invoked on. I do not want 25 datatemplates in my main usercontrol. I would like to put it in a separate xaml; I have a mapresources.xaml already that is added via app.xaml in resource dictionary. see this: right now I am testing with 1 template:

ScottSteigerwald · Answer

OK, I'm back to square one. What I'm finding is, if you use the static method (MyFeatureLayerInfoWindowTemplate) vs. the dynamic method (LocationInfoWindowTemplate) for creating InfoWindows, you have new problems either way. In the dynamic method, binding works great, but you then lose the ability to apply rowspan="2" so you can see the entire content of the InfoWindow. In the static method, you seem to lose the binding capabilities. What I am specifically trying to do is allow the user to create new locations with comments at that location which they can eventually save. On the InfoWindow, we want to display the currently logged in user's name. I can't get that part to work, and I fear what will happen when I attempt to capture the comment within the InfoWindow...can it be done? Here's some code, first XAML: