Showing items as images in a WPF ListView

Question

So I have binded a List to a ListView where the List has items of type Album, where it has lots of properties including .Cover, which I is an image on disk. Well since I don't know what type of image is needed and how they have to be loaded (I only know using Image types for Winforms), I don't know the type yet.

Can someone show or post me a quick sample where it shows this sort of items being shown as images of a certain fixed size using their .Cover property?

In essence this would show:

1. What type .Cover should be
2. How to open images from disk for WPF (assuming it's different than Winforms image loading)
3. How to show them on a ListView as images of a certain fixed size, scaling the images if necessary

Solution 1

1. ImageSource
2. ImageSource myImageSource = new BitmapImage(new Uri(@"file://C:... something.jpg"));

3. Specify a data template for the items in the ListView's ItemTemplate property:

   <Window.Resources>
       <DataTemplate x:Key="ItemTemplate">
           <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
               <Image Width="10" Height="10" Stretch="Fill" Source="{Binding Cover}"/>
           <Label Content="{Binding Title}" />
           </StackPanel>
       </DataTemplate>
   </Window.Resources>
   
   <Grid x:Name="grid">
       <ListView ItemTemplate="{StaticResource ItemTemplate}" ItemsSource="{Binding Albums}" />
   </Grid>
   

Solution 2

In xaml you'd define a DataTemplate in your Listview's ItemTemplate that uses an Image, binding it's Source property to a path on your file sysem.

In other words, Cover can be of type string, a file path. If you want to scale, a pretty simple way is a ViewBox, which scales all it contains. However, Image itself probably has options to do scaling.

Comments

[Joan Venge]

Thanks, can you please show me code sample. I don't know ViewBox or the Image binding.

[slugster]

Note that the image can also be sourced from a resource, it doesn't have to come directly from disk. (The resource can be part of the current executing assembly, or it can be in a separate referenced assembly). It can even be a URL to a web address.

[Joan Venge]

Thanks slugster how do you do that?