Working with the WPF HeaderStringFormat Menu and Access Keys Incidentally

Question

Good. Therefore, I want my application to display the "Save" and "Save As ..." elements in its main menu, as Visual Studio does; that is, "Save {current file}" and "Save {current file} How ..."

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

I came up with two solutions, but not very desirable.

• Instead of creating the main menu exclusively in xaml, I could create all of this in MainWindowViewModel so that I can fully control what happens to the created MenuItems. However, I believe that this would be a violation of MVVM (which I am trying to observe very strictly this time), since I would have to include links to each MenuItem icon in the ViewModel. Plus it seems a little dirty.

• I can specify the title of only these two specific MenuItems (and possibly future ones) like this, but then I get a MenuItem that has not only an underscore in the title, but also does not contain an access key.

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

What should I do?

Answer 1

Whelp, figured it out. At least, how to do this with all the main menus described in XAML. Just made the contents of the header an AccessText control instead of a string and 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>