Dealing with WPF Menu HeaderStringFormat and Access Keys among other things

Question

Okay. So I want my application to display in its main menu the "Save" and "Save As..." items just like Visual Studio does; i.e. "Save {current file}" and "Save {current file} As..."

I would also like to have the normal access keys ("S" and "A", respectively).

I've come up with two solutions, but neither is very desirable.

• Instead of creating the main menu exclusively in xaml, I could create it all in the MainWindowViewModel so I'd have full control over what goes into the generated MenuItems. However, I feel that this would be a violation of MVVM (which I'm attempting to abide by very strictly this time around) as I would have to include references to each MenuItem's Icon in the ViewModel. Plus it seems a little messy.

• I can stipulate the header of just these two specific MenuItems (and perhaps future ones) like so, but then I end up getting a MenuItem that not only has a underscore in the header, but also does not contain an access key.

<MenuItem Header="{Binding CurrentFileName}"
          HeaderStringFormat="Save {0} _As...">

What should I do?

Killick

Answer 1

Whelp, figured it out. At least about how to get it done with the whole main menu described in XAML. Just made the header content an AccessText control instead of a string and it works like a charm.

<MenuItem>
    <MenuItem.Style>
        <Style TargetType="{x:Type MenuItem}">
            <Style.Triggers>
                <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding HasSelection}" Value="false">
                    <Setter Property="IsEnabled" Value="false"/>
                    <Setter Property="Header">
                        <Setter.Value>
                            <AccessText Text="Save Selected File _As..."/>
                        </Setter.Value>
                    </Setter>
                </DataTrigger>
                <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding HasSelection}" Value="true">
                    <Setter Property="IsEnabled" Value="true"/>
                    <Setter Property="Header">
                        <Setter.Value>
                            <AccessText Text="{Binding SelectedFile.Filename, StringFormat=Save {0} _As...}"/>
                        </Setter.Value>
                    </Setter>
                </DataTrigger>
            </Style.Triggers>
        </Style>
    </MenuItem.Style>
</MenuItem>

Killick