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Find all controls in WPF Window by type

Asked 2009-06-10T09:40:43.003
251

I'm looking for a way to find all controls on Window by their type,

for example: find all TextBoxes, find all controls implementing specific interface etc.

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3 Answers

16

Use the helper classes VisualTreeHelper or LogicalTreeHelper depending on which tree you're interested in. They both provide methods for getting the children of an element (although the syntax differs a little). I often use these classes for finding the first occurrence of a specific type, but you could easily modify it to find all objects of that type:

public static DependencyObject FindInVisualTreeDown(DependencyObject obj, Type type)
{
    if (obj != null)
    {
        if (obj.GetType() == type)
        {
            return obj;
        }

        for (int i = 0; i < VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(obj); i++)
        {
            DependencyObject childReturn = FindInVisualTreeDown(VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(obj, i), type);
            if (childReturn != null)
            {
                return childReturn;
            }
        }
    }

    return null;
}
answered 2009-06-10T11:30:26.167
4

To get a list of all childs of a specific type you can use:

private static IEnumerable<DependencyObject> FindInVisualTreeDown(DependencyObject obj, Type type)
{
    if (obj != null)
    {
        if (obj.GetType() == type)
        {
            yield return obj;
        }

        for (var i = 0; i < VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(obj); i++)
        {
            foreach (var child in FindInVisualTreeDown(VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(obj, i), type))
            {
                if (child != null)
                {
                    yield return child;
                }
            }
        }
    }

    yield break;
}
answered 2010-04-21T07:54:55.590
2

Do note that using the VisualTreeHelper does only work on controls that derive from Visual or Visual3D. If you also need to inspect other elements (e.g. TextBlock, FlowDocument etc.), using VisualTreeHelper will throw an exception.

Here's an alternative that falls back to the logical tree if necessary:

http://www.hardcodet.net/2009/06/finding-elements-in-wpf-tree-both-ways

answered 2009-06-25T13:02:37.267

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