WPF: FixedDocument in Visual Studio 2008 Designer

Question

It's a well-known bug that Visual Studio shows an error when you try to construct a FixedDocument in XAML. For example, the following snippet

<DocumentViewer>
    <FixedDocument>
        <PageContent>
            <FixedPage Width="21.0cm" Height="29.7cm">
                <TextBlock>Hello World!</TextBlock>
            </FixedPage>
        </PageContent>
    </FixedDocument>
</DocumentViewer>

compiles and runs perfectly fine, but Visual Studio shows an error in the error list (Property 'Pages' does not support values of type 'PageContent'.) This is quite annoying.

I'm looking for a solution that allows me to construct my documents in a XAML file in Visual Studio without getting that error message. I've found a workaround, which I'd like to share below as an answer, but I'm curious if there's a better (more elegant) solution around.

Answer 1

As a workaround, I put the DocumentViewer as well as the page into a grid:

<Grid>
    <FixedPage Width="21.0cm" Height="29.7cm" x:Name="uiPage1">
        <TextBlock>Hello World!</TextBlock>
    </FixedPage>
    <DocumentViewer>
        <FixedDocument x:Name="uiReport">
        </FixedDocument>
    </DocumentViewer>
</Grid>

Then I attach the page to the DocumentViewer in the Loaded event of the window:

VB example:

DirectCast(Me.uiPage1.Parent, Grid).Children.Remove(Me.uiPage1)
Dim content As New PageContent()
DirectCast(content, IAddChild).AddChild(Me.uiPage1)
Me.uiReport.Pages.Add(content)

C# example:

((Grid)uiPage1.Parent).Children.Remove(uiPage1);
var content = new PageContent();
((IAddChild)content).AddChild(uiPage1);
uiReport.Pages.Add(content);