ContentPresenter in ItemControl.ItemTemplate to show displaymemberpath of itemscontrol

Question

I want to know is there anyway to put contentpresenter in itemtemplate of an itemscontrol to display my data. I don't want hard code binding like Text="{Binding username}" cause I am building a custom control, I think ContentPresenter is what I want. But after I tried using contentpresenter, it give me stackoverflowexception.

    <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding SelectedItems, ElementName=listbox}" DisplayMemberPath={Binding DisplayMemberPath}">
        <ItemsControl.ItemPanel>
            <ItemsPanelTemplate>
                <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" IsItemsHost="True"/>
            </ItemsPanelTemplate>
        </ItemsControl.ItemPanel>
        <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
            <DataTemplate>
                <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal">
                    <TextBlock x:Name="Separator" Text=", "/>
                    <ContentPresenter/>
                    <!--<TextBlock Text="{Binding username}"/>-->
                </StackPanel>
            </DataTemplate>
        </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate>
    </ItemsControl>

That's my code. If without those seperator and itemtemplate, I able to display my data by just using the displaymemberpath, but it stack all the name together. I still finding any solution to solve it. I hope you can provide some ideas to do this.

Answer 1

The answer is no, you can't. A ContentPresenter is supposed to be used in a ControlTemplate, not a DataTemplate, so it is not the right control to use. From the linked page on MSDN:

You typically use the ContentPresenter in the ControlTemplate of a ContentControl to specify where the content is to be added.

What you can do alternatively, is to declare a number of DataTemplates in a Resources section (complete with Binding Paths) for different types of data and omit the x:Key directives, eg. do not name them. Also, do not specify one for the ItemsControl.ItemTemplate.

When doing this, WPF will implicitly select the correct DataTemplate for the relevant data type and so you can have different outputs for different data types. See the The DataType Property section of the Data Templating Overview page on MSDN for further explanation of this technique.