How to change property value of a view inside CarouselView's ItemTemplate? - xamarin.forms

Question

I have a CarouselView with ItemTemplate containing a Label and a Grid. Outside of that CarouselView, I want to make a button to modify Carousel's current item's Grid's visibility. Because it's inside ItemTemplate, I can't use x:Name to refer to that specific Grid, so how can I refer to the current item's Grid so I can change its property value? Thank you.

Answer 1

You will want to do that through databinding. As you already mentioned, you can't use x:Name. This is because you're inside of a template. The value in x:Name would be duplicated for each time that template is applied to a concrete item in your list, in this case a CarouselView. Moreover; if you use virtualization for that list, a template might not even exist at all at that point in time. All reasons why you can't use x:Name to reference anything inside of a template.
I don't have any info about the code you want to use this with, so I'll make something up.
If the backing collection for your CarouselView is a ObservableCollection<MyItem>, then your CarouselView might look something like this:
<!-- Databinding scope here is MyViewModel -->
<CarouselView ItemsSource="{Binding MyItemsCollection}">
<CarouselView.ItemTemplate>
<!-- Databinding scope here is MyItem -->
<DataTemplate>
<Button Text="Delete" IsVisible="{Binding CanDelete}" />
</DataTemplate>
</CarouselView.ItemTemplate>
</CarouselView>
So you will have a backing view model which has a MyItemsCollection, and your page (that holds the CarouselView) has set the BindingContext to a new instance of MyViewModel:
public class MyViewModel
{
public ObservableCollection<MyItem> MyItemsCollection { get; set; } = new ObservableCollection<MyItem>();
private void LoadData()
{
var items = _myItemService.GetItems();
foreach (var item in items)
{
MyItemsCollection.Add(item);
}
}
}
Whenever you want to influence the IsVisible you will want to set the CanDelete of the MyItem that it's about to false. Let's assume MyItem looks like this:
public class MyItem
{
public bool CanDelete { get; set; }
}
You will need to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface on it so that the UI will pick up on any changes that are made to property values.
Now whenever you set the CanDelete of a certain instance of MyItem to false, that will change your UI. E.g.: MyItemsCollection[3].CanDelete = false;
On my YouTube channel I added a playlist with videos about data binding which might help in cases like these.
PS. At the time of writing IsVisible is bugged in .NET MAUI