WPF ASCII grid part 3

It’s been a while since I last posted about my efforts to write a simple WPF app. At the end of my last post I had managed to create a custom control to display my ASCII grid and things were coming along nicely. The next thing I wanted to was pretty straightforward, or so I thought… I wanted to add a property to my control that decides whether the grid shows the standard ASCII values or the extended ASCII range. To do this I thought the simplest thing to do, when the property value changed, was clear out my grid and re-add the cells with the new values. Maybe not the most efficient approach but it seemed like the simplest option since there doesn’t seem a way to access the cell contents of a grid to change the text values.

But the problem with this approach is it doesn’t really work. Changing the property value calls the code but afterwards all that can be seen is the grid lines, not the new contents of the cells. Resizing the window does show the new cell contents so I assumed this was a refresh issue. Looking in to how to refresh a WPF control came up with these possible options

• Call Dispatcher.Invoke with a priority of DispatcherPriority.Render
• Call InvalidateVisual
• Call InvalidateMeasure
• Call InvalidateArrange
• Call Measure
• Call OnChildDesiredSizeChanged

I’ve no idea which of these I should be calling but I tried all of them and none had any effect. So I am at something of a loss. I think the next step is to rework my code so I don’t recreate the TextBlocks I’m using to display the ASCII values and just update the Text property of the existing TextBlocks instead.