The application I'm currently working on has a rather complex UI. It's something like two tabbed work spaces and an outlook-like work space, that make one workspace by itself, that can have several instances inside another tabbed workspace, that can have several instances inside another tabbed workspace. Imagine something like Visual Studio, inside a tab.
Each work space is controlled by its own work item and the same goes to every smart part.
With a UI like this, the work item activation service supplied by the CAB is of no use for me because I need to know what is the active work item at various levels.
What I came up with to solve my problem is the following implementation of the work item activation service:
public class HierarchicalWorkItemActivationService : IWorkItemActivationService
{
private object syncroot = new object();
private WorkItem activeWorkItem;
private WorkItem hostingWorkItem;
public HierarchicalWorkItemActivationService()
{
}
[ServiceDependency]
public WorkItem HostingWorkItem
{
set
{
Debug.Assert(value != null);
if (value == null)
{
throw new ArgumentNullException("value");
}
Debug.Assert(this.hostingWorkItem == null);
if (this.hostingWorkItem != null)
{
throw new InvalidOperationException("HostingWorkItem already set.");
}
this.hostingWorkItem = value;
}
}
public void ChangeStatus(WorkItem item)
{
lock (syncroot)
{
if (item == this.hostingWorkItem)
{
WorkItem hostingParentWorkItem = this.hostingWorkItem.Parent;
if (hostingParentWorkItem != null)
{
IWorkItemActivationService parentWorkItemActivationService = hostingParentWorkItem.Services.Get<IWorkItemActivationService>();
if (parentWorkItemActivationService != null)
{
parentWorkItemActivationService.ChangeStatus(this.hostingWorkItem);
}
}
}
else
{
if (item.Status == WorkItemStatus.Active)
{
if (item != this.activeWorkItem)
{
if (this.activeWorkItem != null && this.activeWorkItem.Status != WorkItemStatus.Terminated)
{
this.activeWorkItem.Deactivate();
// If the activeWorkItem is still active deactivates the item and aborts.
if (this.activeWorkItem.Status == WorkItemStatus.Active)
{
item.Deactivate();
return;
}
}
this.activeWorkItem = item;
}
}
}
}
}
}
For those who like to unit test their software and are developing CAB applications, the SCSF comes with sample applications with unit tests. These unit tests are built on top of an useful set of testable classes which one of them is the TestableRootWorkItem.