Is there a way to separate the "Data" from the “GUI” in PivotViewer?

Question

Hello all,

I have a design problem and I hope to get an advice from the Silverlight/PivotViewers experts in this forum. I’m novice to C#, Silverlight, web services and .net applications, so apologize upfront if this is a stupid question.

I have a static pivot collection (specified using a combination of .cxml file and deepzoom images). Using Silverlight 5, I am able to view the collection in a pivotviewer control and add additional information that was not existed before in original .cxml file. The next step will be, naturally, to provide some form of data persistence, that will allow the user to save/load the modified model data (so his changes won’t get lost).

To this end, I created a WCF web service that can get/send data from/to the Silverlight client (that contain the pivotViewer control). Ideally, I’d save on the server “just” the model data (that was originally specified in the .cxml file), and not everything that is referenced in ‘pivotViewerItem’). 

My questions:

a) is there a way to separate between the items facet data (i.e., what is described by the collection schema) from the rest of the “GUI” state (the viewer)?

b) Is there any build-in support for saving updates to ItemSource ? 

c) What is the accepted mechanism for serialization in Silverlight application?

Thanks! Liram 

Answer 1

a) is there a way to separate between the items facet data (i.e., what is described by the collection schema) from the rest of the “GUI” state (the viewer)?

You can find the stucture here, http://www.silverlight.net/learn/data-networking/pivot-viewer/pivotviewer-control 

b) Is there any build-in support for saving updates to ItemSource ? 

Silverlight 5 PivotViewer now responds to changes within the collection as well as changes to the individual objects themselves.

http://tonychampion.net/blog/index.php/2011/12/pivotviewer-basics-dynamic-collections/

Answer 2

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

Regurding question 'a':

If I have a Pivotviewer instance in the memory, and let say I changed some of the items properties (For instance: item_A.color = Blue --> Green). Now, How can I "Save" only the items data information to some data structure that I will be able to serialize to the server?

Thanks!