While Fredrik's answer provides a refactored approach with additional method that could potentially be reused in other parts of the code, I preferred to consolidate his methods in to one single method. There may also be some small performance gain because it can end the search as soon as it finds the header and it does not need to continue to search through all the children in the visual tree (this is most likely negligible for most cases).
private DataGridColumnHeader GetHeader(DataGridColumn column, DependencyObject reference)
{
for (int i = 0; i < VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(reference); i++)
{
DependencyObject child = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(reference, i);
DataGridColumnHeader colHeader = child as DataGridColumnHeader;
if ((colHeader != null) && (colHeader.Column == column))
{
return colHeader;
}
colHeader = GetHeader(column, child);
if (colHeader != null)
{
return colHeader;
}
}
return null;
}
And it is used like so:
DataGridColumnHeader colHeader = GetHeader(column, myDataGrid);
if (colHeader == null) { /* Not found */ }
AutoGeneratedColumns
event (it can't find any headers yet, it returns null). It does work afterwards. So when exactly are these headers created?! – Kesterson