WPF TabControl Databinding

Question

I'm trying to build a WPF user interface containing a TabControl, and a TextBlock.

I want to bind these two controls to an underlying collection of instances of the following class:

class PageModel
{
  public string Title {get;set;}
  public string TabCaption {get;set;}
  public FrameworkElement TabContent {get;set}
}

The tab control should display a tab for each PageModel.

• Each tab's header should display the TabCaption property
• Each tab's content should be the TabContent property.

The TextBlock should display the Title of the currently selected tab.

How can I achieve this result?

Solution 1

<TabControl x:Name="_tabControl" ItemsSource="{Binding PageModels}">
    <TabControl.ItemContainerStyle>
        <Style TargetType="TabItem">
            <Setter Property="Header" Value="{Binding TabCaption}"/>
            <Setter Property="Content" Value="{Binding TabContent}"/>
        </Style>
    </TabControl.ItemContainerStyle>
</TabControl>
<TextBlock Text="{Binding SelectedItem.Title, ElementName=_tabControl}"/>

Solution 2

I also found another solution to this here using ItemTemplate and ContentTemplate.

Also for any WPF newbies like me, after some headaches and frustration I realized that the collection of page models needs to be an ObservableCollection<PageModel> instead of a List<PageModel> or any changes to the list will not be reflected by the tabs (i.e. you can't add or remove a tab if it's a list).