Changing the border for a DatePicker control on Windows Phone 7
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.
Join For FreeThere is a neat package of controls that comes pre-bundled with the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone. It saves you a lot of time on creating custom user controls and at the same time keeps your application consistent with the main Windows Phone UI. One particular case I want to talk about today is that related to control customizations. Specifically, I tried to customize a DatePicker border.
The whole idea was triggered by this question. Surprisingly, setting the border directly via XAML had no effect whatsoever - I was able set the border thickness, but not the color. Not something out of the normal flow of things, so I fired up Expression Blend, referenced the control library, added the DatePicker control on the main page and tried to get its template. I already performed a similar "operation" on a ComboBox control and didn't expect this one to be any more complicated. However, a surprise was waiting:
No template that I can edit - pretty disappointing to see. After a minute of thinking I realized that somehow the default control properties are set anyway, and thanks to the fact that the toolkit has the source code available, I was able to take a look under the hood and see what's up.
And here is what I found out in the first place - all controls have their visual properties defined in one theme file - Generic.xaml, located in the Themes folder.
A template file is always a good place to start when there are visual property problems, so I scrolled a bit to the point when I saw the DatePicker control listed:
I noticed one weird thing about this particular style - it had no BorderBrush setter defined, therefore it makes total sense that the BorderBrush manual setting didn't work. An easy fix was implemented pretty quick.
In the main style, I added the following setter:
<Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="Azure"/>
Of course you can set this to a different color or even to a static resource that will be linked to the phone theme. I am using azure just for testing purposes.
The picker you are seeing is nothing but a button, so I scroll down to the button part and add this property reference:
BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}"
This links the border brush of the button to the border brush of the template. Nothing fancy here. Overall, you should have this:
Recompile the library and reference it instead in your project.
NOTE: If you have the toolkit installed on your system, the default reference for Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit will be taken from GAC instead of what you built. Either rename the library or make a local copy in the project folder.
Once done, you will be able to set the brush as you want it:
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
Trending
-
Transactional Outbox Patterns Step by Step With Spring and Kotlin
-
Front-End: Cache Strategies You Should Know
-
AI Technology Is Drastically Disrupting the Background Screening Industry
-
Implementing RBAC in Quarkus
Comments