How to handle removal of a related group of WPF UI Elements

Question

I'm interested in what is the best way to implement the removal of related set of UI elements.

This is what I'm working on: I have a Grid embedded within a verticle Scrollviewer. The user can add multiple Listboxes to this Grid during runtime via a button click. Each ListBox, when added, will also result in the addition of the correct number of Grid Rowdefinitions and a Gridsplitter to allow the resizing of each Listbox. This parts works fine.

The trick is this -- the user also has the option of closing a Listbox. When they do this, I will need to remove the corresponding Rowdefinitions and Gridsplitter that "belongs" to the closing Listbox.

Via iteration through Grid.Children and Grid.Rowdefinitions, I could somewhat easily figure out which Rowdefinitions and Gridsplitters to remove. But I'm wondering if there is a better way to handle this. Perhaps by grouping these elements together in a collection and simply removing this collection in one fell swoop? No idea how to do this, though.

Any ideas or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

I'm not aware of an obvious or simple way to associate them within the visual/logical tree, but you could certainly use an associative array (Dictionary<T, U>) that's keyed off of the element you're removing with the contents as the other items that need to be removed.

I think this is essentially what you described.

Anything more clever wouldn't be worth the additional complexity, I think, unless you had a specific need for it. :)