Binding an ItemsSource to an Enum

18 August 2015 - less than 1 min read time
Tags: wpf xaml combobox tutorial

This rather quick post is about enabling an Enum to be set as the ItemsSource of a ComboBox, ListBox etc. You can find the sample code on Github.

Our implementation will result in the following xaml code:

In the above code snippet, the ItemsSource is bound to the enum Animals

by introducing a new MarkupExtension called EnumToItemsSourceExtension:

By inheriting from the MarkupExtension class, we have to implement the abstract method ProvideValue . Using the Enum.GetValues() method, we retrieve an array of the values of the constants in the provided enumeration (Animals) and we return it, so that the ItemsSource can bind to it.