WPF pagination, printing & other stuff

The main purpose of this repository is to demonstrate how to create paginated printable documents from plain old XAML controls with the help of attached properties and a paginator class.

I made this repository for myself so that I won't forget how I did it, which is why I also added other features that I think will be useful for my future WPF development work.

Features include:

• Paginating XAML documents if they contain ItemsControl derived controls.
• Setting page numbers and other properties (e.g. header on first page only) on paginated documents.
• Getting correct page margins based on printer capabilities and applying them on the generated pages.
• How printing in general works in WPF (Fetching USB printers, etc...)
• Creating an MVVM dialog service that can be used in ViewModels to show modal / regular dialogs.
• Creating an animated progress indicator.
• Using Caliburn.Micro framework (Alpha version with async support)
• Simple styling, dependecy injection, and other simple stuff

This code is meant as a reference for myself, and some parts are ugly or done on purpose to workaround certain issues, so don't just copy paste but try to understand what is happening and read the comments.

How the pagination works

It's very simple: the reports (or documents, or whatever you want to call them) are simple XAML user controls with headers and lists and all the regular WPF stuff. The only exception is the addition of attached properties (found in Document.cs file) that are read by / written to by the Paginator class. These attached properties help the paginator know when to hide certain elements, which lists to paginate, and where to set page numbers. The paginator itself is where the magic happens.

The paginator looks for any controls that derive from ItemsControl and checks to see if it has the Paginate attached property set to true, and if it is, the paginator will save the contents in memory and clears the list, then starts adding the items again one by one. After each addition, the paginator checks if the last added item is fully visible, and if not, will create a new page and continues from there until all the items have been added.

Example reports can be loaded by clicking the buttons on the left. They exist in the Reports folder.

Important!

Pagination requires that the height (or width if paginating horizontally) of the list is known. This means that you should place your ItemsControl in a panel such as Grid with * height/width, or a DockPanel, or whatever panel that does not grow infinitely like the StackPanel does. This is not a limitation of the paginator, if you place a ScrollViewer inside such a panel (Grid with Auto size, or StackPanel), you will notice that the scrollbar keeps growing infinitely as well.

Best practice is to place the list in a star sized row/column in a Grid.

Other notes

The DialogService handles showing/hiding dialogs in an MVVM way. I first implemented it using Caliburn.Micro version 3 where activation is still synchronous, but here I've written it for version 4 which is async, and I've added code that activates the viewmodels when showing (and deactivating when hiding) the dialogs. I haven't tested it too well so don't be surprised to find some weird async bugs here and there. Seems to work well so far? :)