BSA – Selecting WPF Components

Having a good Property Editor is important for BSA. In QML I had no choise but to start making my own, but I have ended up doing the same on every platform I tried. In WPF I could get a free one or buy one, but do I want to?

My objects will have sub-tables and properties like description that is hard to do in any property editor + StackPanel can basically create a property editor using edit objects I can create allowing for an easy adding of custom editors. Yes, this is work, but the graphical editor and the property editor is key to BSA.

I have the same issue on the graphical editor. I could use a 3rd party diagram editor, but my experience is that I will end up tweaking them because it is key functionality and is better off making my own from scratch.

So, in short – for Graphical Editor and Property Editor I will do it the hard way – from scratch myself – not because I want to, but because they are key to BSA and 3rd party components might just be in my way.

This is a hard decision you better make up front. I have far to often spent hours tweaking 3rd party components on critical functionality knowing that you have to be very selective. The question you always need to ask is If your application can adapt to the component, or if your component need to adapt to your application? In case of the later you need to be carefully.

A 3rd component I need is a DataGrid with inline edit options – in this case I have no challenge with adapting to whatever I got to work with, meaning I will use the build-in DataGrid which is actually very good.

Another recommendation learned from hard experience is that you should select 3rd party libraries with care, because you will have to live with them afterwards. Myself I often find it easier to create something I myself have control over than adapting to someone elses design and quality. But, again – I have never been afraid of putting my back into coding!

Designing my own property editor will probably also lead to another decition – I will systematically need to enable/create in-line editor options. I will use whatever WPF have and tweak it if I can or create new ones from scratch. The advantage is that I can re-use those for more advanced diagram-in-lines and I might get some 3rd party assistance. It is a lot of good developers out there that has released good solutions that can be re-used.

Categories: HMI

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