HintProperties for a ListBox

Hi Eric,

That's an interesting idea and while we'd like to possibly add it, there are technical limitations in the way.  The only way to know if an ItemsControl has content is to look at its Items collection.  We can attach to an event on that collection to get notified of the collection change, however that event handler doesn't have any reference to the containing ItemsControl.  Since hinting is done as an attached behavior and we don't have an ItemsControl reference, we're unable to tell the ItemsControl whether it now has items or not so that its theme can determine whether to show the hint.

Hi Eric,

Thanks for reporting your findings.  A lot of that is what we've noticed as well.  You might just be best off making some overlay on your own (such as in within a Grid that also contains the ListBox) and binding its Visibility to the ListBox.Items.Count, but with a value converter that converts a number to a Visibility.  You could have a Count = 0 mean Visible and anything else mean Collapsed.

Yup that is what we have done in the past. I just wanted to explore the idea of adding a Hint to the ListBox like you guys have done for other controls like the TextBlock because it cuts down on code. I love it. Its frustrating that the ListBox is not directly accessable from somekind of collection changed event. Thanks.

Is there any documentation why (ThemeManager.AreNativeThemesEnabled?) and where (ComboBox, TextBox, ...?) this is working at all? I clicked through all pages of "Actipro Shared Library" but found no mention at all. (Just came across it via Demo "MetroStyleWindow" inside WindowChrome.TitleBarContentTemplate).

Hello,

AreNativeThemesEnabled is described in the "Actipro Themes \ Native Controls" documentation topic.  We have defined themes for all native WPF controls that render consistently with our own controls.  But those are only applied by default on native WPF controls when that property is set to true.  The list of supported controls is in that topic under the style keys portion.