Where do I get a thread-safe CollectionView?

Question

When updating a collection of business objects on a background thread I get this error message:

This type of CollectionView does not support changes to its SourceCollection from a thread different from the Dispatcher thread.

Ok, that makes sense. But it also begs the question, what version of CollectionView does support multiple threads and how do I make my objects use it?

Answer 1

Use:

System.Windows.Application.Current.Dispatcher.Invoke(
    System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherPriority.Normal,
    (Action)delegate() 
    {
         // Your Action Code
    });

Answer 2

The following is an improvement on the implementation found by Jonathan. Firstly it runs each event handler on the dispatcher associated with it rather than assuming that they are all on the same (UI) dispatcher. Secondly it uses BeginInvoke to allow processing to continue while we wait for the dispatcher to become available. This makes the solution much faster in situations where the background thread is doing lots of updates with processing between each one. Perhaps more importantly it overcomes problems caused by blocking while waiting for the Invoke (deadlocks can occur for example when using WCF with ConcurrencyMode.Single).

public class MTObservableCollection<T> : ObservableCollection<T>
{
    public override event NotifyCollectionChangedEventHandler CollectionChanged;
    protected override void OnCollectionChanged(NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs e)
    {
        NotifyCollectionChangedEventHandler CollectionChanged = this.CollectionChanged;
        if (CollectionChanged != null)
            foreach (NotifyCollectionChangedEventHandler nh in CollectionChanged.GetInvocationList())
            {
                DispatcherObject dispObj = nh.Target as DispatcherObject;
                if (dispObj != null)
                {
                    Dispatcher dispatcher = dispObj.Dispatcher;
                    if (dispatcher != null && !dispatcher.CheckAccess())
                    {
                        dispatcher.BeginInvoke(
                            (Action)(() => nh.Invoke(this,
                                new NotifyCollectionChangedEventArgs(NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Reset))),
                            DispatcherPriority.DataBind);
                        continue;
                    }
                }
                nh.Invoke(this, e);
            }
    }
}

Because we are using BeginInvoke, it is possible that the change being notified is undone before the handler is called. This would typically result in an "Index was out of range." exception being thrown when the event arguments are checked against the new (altered) state of the list. In order to avoid this, all delayed events are replaced with Reset events. This could cause excessive redrawing in some cases.

Answer 3

This post by Bea Stollnitz explains that error message and why it's worded the way it is.

EDIT: From Bea's blog

Unfortunately, this code results in an exception: “NotSupportedException – This type of CollectionView does not support changes to its SourceCollection from a thread different from the Dispatcher thread.” I understand this error message leads people to think that, if the CollectionView they’re using doesn’t support cross-thread changes, then they have to find the one that does. Well, this error message is a little misleading: none of the CollectionViews we provide out of the box supports cross-thread collection changes. And no, unfortunately we can not fix the error message at this point, we are very much locked down.