WPF Datepicker making only a list of dates selectable

Question

I'm not sure if this is possible but is it possible to make only a list of dates selectable in a wpf datepicker?

I need to make sure that the use can only select from a certain amount of dates. I can do this with a dropdownlist, but with a datepicker it would be much nicer.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The DatePicker has the following properties to control which dates should be selectable:

DisplayDateStart : The first date to include in the Calendar popup.
DisplayDateEnd : The last date to include in the Calendar popup.

So if you have a list containing allowed dates, you can set DisplayDateStart to the first item in the list, and DisplayDateEnd to the last item in the list.

That would prevent users from selecting dates outside that range.

To handle cases where the list of allowed dates contains gaps, you can use the BlackoutDates property to make ranges of dates not selectable.

So to add the dates that are not present in the list as blacked out, you can do something like the following.

Only the dates within the list are shown in the calendar popup, and the dates not in the list are blacked out so they can't be selected.

var dates = new List<DateTime>
{
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 5),
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 6),
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 7),
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 8),
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 15),
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 16),
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 28),
    new DateTime(2013, 1, 29),
    new DateTime(2013, 2, 9),
    new DateTime(2013, 2, 12),
    new DateTime(2013, 2, 13),
    new DateTime(2013, 2, 17),
    new DateTime(2013, 2, 18)
};

var firstDate = dates.First();
var lastDate = dates.Last();
var dateCounter = firstDate;

foreach (var d in dates.Skip(1))
{
    if (d.AddDays(-1).Date != dateCounter.Date)
    {
        dtp.BlackoutDates.Add(
            new CalendarDateRange(dateCounter.AddDays(1), d.AddDays(-1)));
    }

    dateCounter = d;
}

dtp.DisplayDateStart = firstDate;
dtp.DisplayDateEnd = lastDate;

If the allowed dates are very far apart, this would probably not be very user friendly, since it would be pretty annoying to have 90% of the dates blacked out. In that case a ComboBox might be better.