You are thinking about this correctly. AppBar
is the place where you should put all your non-essential and selection based commands.
The guidelines here and here suggest that they should be arranged as follows:
- Navigation commands should be in
TopAppBar
- Commands related to selection should on the left side of
BottomAppBar
- The rest of page specific commands should be on the right side of
BottomAppBar
Contextual commands should only be shown when a relevant item to that command is selected. For that purpose you should set Visibility
of these commands accordingly. Also AppBar
should open automatically when an item with contextual commands in it is selected. You can do that programmatically by setting its IsOpen
property. You should also set it to sticky mode by via IsSticky
property.
If you're using MVVM you can bind your viewmodel properties to all Button
and AppBar
properties mentioned above.
There's a CustomAppBar
control available in WinRT XAML Toolkit. I haven't used it myself yet but it has a couple of extra features that might prove useful in your case.