Closing a View from a ViewModel

[james1301]

Hi, is there a reason there is no built in way to close a view from the view model? Often you may want to send up confirmation or possibly control on a can execute when they can close, so makes sense to go through the View Model and for it to handle it?

My exact example is that I have an all active region, which is basically like the windows start menu (current) with tiles and the user unpins these to close.

At the moment I am removing the view from the region by matching on the DataContext being the ViewModel of the one that wants to be closed but this is quite legacy code and does seem quite dodgy. I could interface them up and do a similar thing but ideally this would be done on some kind of service? Possibly the RegionManager or Navigation service could offer up a close? Which uses the VM to maybe close?

As it currently is, it is not the best Unit Testable code, or requires a bit of setup.

What are the thoughts on this?

[brianlagunas]

"Closing" a view is removing it from the region. The navigation API is not used for removing views, only the Region API allows you to remove a view from a region. Your "tile" control should be handling removing the view form the region when you "Close" the tile.

It's the same concept that I cover in my Mastering the TabControl course on Pluralsight which shows you how to "close" a tab and remove the view form the region.

Watch it here: https://pluralsight.pxf.io/B6X99

[james1301]

Thanks @brianlagunas. That is a good example of exactly what I asked, but I guess I didn't quite give you my exact scenario.

So usually you pin a tile and then unpin it, which would be absolutely fine instigating from the tile itself. But some tiles basically are pinned temporarily to run some action before then closing. So currently for these tiles they basically navigate to the view model, passing execute and close parameter. It does it's action then does the close all in the VM.

I guess you'd still say to run it through the view for these scenarios? Possibly setting a progress bool to true and then when it hits false start closing the view? Or something like that. Or is there anything else you would recommend?