Caliburn Micro: How to bind ActivateItem to selectionEvents in Conductors

Question

As can be seen in the SimpleMDI Caliburn Micro project there are some conventions that bind the selectionEvent in tabControls to the ActivateItem in a Conductor. I can't really see any mention of what this event might be.

However when you have a control that doesn't fullfill these convention I'm lost on how to manage them myself.

I have a Telerik RadTreeView that I want to manage with a conductor to be able to load on demand the childs of nodes (via WCF call).

Here is where I am at:

<telerik:RadTreeView x:Name="Items"
                     cal:Message.Attach="[Event Selected] = [ActivateItem($dataContext)]"  />

Passing $dataContext is wrong because that way he passes the Conductor itself, $SelectedItem returns null.

So my rather simple question is threefold.

1) If RadTreeView is a Selecetor why doesn't the basic CM convention work with it,

2) What event should I use to call ActiveItem

3) What could I pass in.

Answer 1

This might help understand the different approaches to doing treeviews and mvvm.

I was using the RadTreeView also and I ended up sending the events to the ViewModel that hosted the Items collection of TreeViewItemViewModel. When an action/event, for example, Edit, was sent to the MainViewModel, I had a method like:

 public void Edited(object sender, RadTreeViewItemEditedEventArgs e)
        {
            var treeViewItemViewModel = e.NewValue as IEditable;
            if (treeViewItemViewModel == null) return;

            treeViewItemViewModel.EndEdit();
        }

So this worked at any level in the tree and also worked for having different behaviors, checking to see if the interface for different things was implemented.

xaml for the RadTreeView

 <telerik:RadTreeView x:Name="MyTree"
                                     Grid.Row="1"
                                     Margin="0,20,0,0"
                                     VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
                                     FontSize="16"
                                     FontFamily="{StaticResource MainFontFamily}"
                                     ItemsSource="{Binding Children, Mode=TwoWay}"
                                     ItemTemplate="{StaticResource HierarchicalDataTemplate}"
                                     ItemEditTemplateSelector="{StaticResource ItemEditTemplateSelector}"
                                     ItemEditTemplate="{x:Null}"
                                     IsLoadOnDemandEnabled="True"
                                     IsEditable="True"
                                     IsDragDropEnabled="True"
                                     DropExpandDelay="00:00:01"
                                     telerik:TextSearch.TextPath="ItemId"
                                     PathSeparator="|"
                                     cal:Message.Attach="
                                    [Event LoadOnDemand] = [Action LoadOnDemand($eventArgs)];
                                    [Event PreviewDragStarted] = [Action PreviewDragStarted($source,$eventArgs)];
                                    [Event PreviewDragEnded] = [Action PreviewDragEnded($source,$eventArgs)];
                                    [Event DragEnded] = [Action DragEnded($source,$eventArgs)];
                                    [Event Edited] = [Action Edited($source,$eventArgs)];
                                    [Event EditCanceled] = [Action EditCanceled($source,$eventArgs)]"/>