textwrapping – Matthias Shapiro

How Do I Wrap Text (or Add TextEllipsis) In The ComboBox?

by Matthias Shapiro
Blend, combobox, How To..., Tutorial, WPF, XAML

I’ve been spending the past several days fighting with the ComboBox in an attempt to make it so something very simple: Wrap text inside the combo box. I’ve finally figured it out, so I thought I’d share.

OK, first of all, make sure that your ComboBox is hooked up to something, even if that something is some random RSS feed. I have a post that can help you with that over here. Bind your comboBox to the “Items” part of the New York Times RSS feed.

You need to do this because, if you do not, you will have to set the same data template to every single ComboBoxItem that you add to the ComboBox. And that’s just no fun.

Starting out, your ComboBox should look something like this:

ComboBoxDefault

Right click on your ComboBox and select “Edit Other Templates -> Edit Generated Items (ItemTemplate)-> Create Empty…” Give your new data template a name and Blend will take you into the Data Template design.

Ellipsis and TextWrapping in a ListView Column

by Matthias Shapiro
Blend, How To..., listview, WPF, XAML

In response to the questions:

How do I make it so that, instead of cutting off the text in my column when I shorten it, my text displays ellipsis?

and

How do I make it so that my text wraps when I shorten my columns?

I’ll deal with the first one first and the second one… second.

That sounded better in my head than it looks on the screen.

With the first question… when a column is shortened, this is what normally happens:

CellTemplate Default Text

And, instead, we want this to happen:

CellTemplate Ellipss