Text Trimming in Silverlight 4

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Introduction

Have you ever tried Trimming your Text in Silverlight 2 or Silverlight 3? If yes, just recall the lines of code you wrote for trimming your text content and showing an Ellipsis (i.e. “…” three dots) at the end of the text. If you didn’t try it earlier, then just imagine what you have to do and how you will do. Also imagine the no. of lines you have to write.

In this post, I will show you how I can implement this feature the easy way. Stop!!! I will not write here a huge code nor I will use any library to do that. Microsoft has added this functionality in Silverlight 4. You just have to set the Enum value to the TextBlock property. Wao!!!

So, how to do that? Let us try it.

Begin with the Code

Create a new Silverlight Project and add one TextBox and a TextBlock. I will bind the TextBox content to the TextBlock so that, when we modify the content of the TextBox, it will immediately reflect in the TextBlock’s Text content.

You can find the code here:

<TextBox x:Name="txtMessage"
Width="200" Height="25" Margin="10" />
<TextBlock x:Name="txbMessage"
Text="{Binding Path=Text, ElementName=txtMessage}"
TextWrapping="Wrap"
Width="200" Height="60" Margin="10" />

Be sure that, you set some boundary to the TextBlock i.e. Height and Width. It will make the TextBlock a fixed size control. Once you run your application, start typing on the TextBox you will notice that the TextBlock itself is updating with the text you are entering in the TextBox automatically. If you are writing a huge amount of text inside the TextBox, you will notice that after the specified size the text inside the TextBlock is growing but not creating any Ellipsis!!!

I think, you are confused again!!! Why it is not working!!! Wait a minute. We didn’t instruct the TextBlock to trim the text. Now let us do that. We will set the enum property “TextTrimming” to “WordEllipsis” and here is the code for the same:

<TextBox x:Name="txtMessage"
Width="200" Height="25" Margin="10" />
<TextBlock x:Name="txbMessage"
Text="{Binding Path=Text, ElementName=txtMessage}"
TextTrimming="WordEllipsis" TextWrapping="Wrap"
Width="200" Height="60" Margin="10" />

Once you run your application now and start typing a huge content you will see that, after a certain length of text (generally the dimension of the TextBlock to set the content) the whole string has been cropped and set one Ellipsis i.e. three dots (“…”) at the end of the last word. If you type more inside the TextBox it will not reflect in the TextBlock content.

End Note

This is a new feature in Silverlight 4 and you will find it very useful when you want to trim some portion of text. You don’t have to write any code for it to implement. It is available by default. So, why to wait for? Go and try the sample code. Enjoy…

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