Pirac Documentation

Pirac is a reactive based MVVM library for WPF.

Quickstart

To get started with Pirac all that's needed is to add the following method to the App code. You will need a MainViewModel to start.

protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e)
{
    PiracRunner.Start<MainViewModel>();
}

You can also provide a context for Pirac, which allows you to configure extra things.

PiracRunner.Start<MainViewModel>(new PiracContext());

PropertyChanging.Fody & PropertyChanged.Fody auto-implements property change code.
DynamicData provides a set of tools for working with collections in a reactive way.
Reactive.EventAggregator an EventAggregator for ViewModel <-> ViewModel decoupled communication if needed.
WPFConverters provides a useful set of converters for WPF.
MaterialDesignInXamlToolkit takes Google design ideas and provides a consistently-named set of brushes and other resources for creating beautiful looking apps.

Pirac Context

PiracContext allows you to set various things needed by Pirac.

  • Logger is a function that returns an ILogger given a name of a class for the logger.
  • Container which overrides the internal LightInject IoC container with your own.
  • WindowManager for creating windows and dialogs.
  • MainScheduler & BackgroundScheduler are IScheduler objects for scheduling reactive work on the main UI thread, and a background worker thread.
  • AttachmentConvention, ViewConvention, and ViewModelConvention are convention types from Conventional for defining Views, ViewModels, and Attachments for Pirac to automatically find.

ViewModels

BindableObject provides a basic implementation for ViewModel objects. It also implements the following interfaces:

  • IObservablePropertyChanging & IObservablePropertyChanged which provide a Changing and Changed observable property. Pirac also has extension methods to filter these observables based on property name.
  • IObservableDataErrorInfo which provides an ErrorsChanged observable with errors based on INotifyDataErrorInfo.

There are also helper methods.

  • SuppressNotifications which stops all notifications. It returns a disposable, which resumes notifications when the object is disposed.
  • OnPropertyChanging and OnPropertyChanged which trigger PropertyChanging and PropertyChanged events and observables.
  • SetDataError which sets the error message for a property.
  • ResetDataError which clears the error message for a property.

Attachments

Attachments are a way of splitting up your ViewModel using composability into reusable parts.

Commands

The Command class is a static class with methods for creating command objects. It can create standard and async commands with automatic code to disable/re-enable the command while it's running.

But this is a reactive library. Therefore we can also create a command from a boolean observable to enable/disable the command.

canExecuteObservable.ToCommand(() => { /* Code to execute */ });