Thomas Freudenberg

Binding WebBrowser content in WPF

When you’re using a WebBrowser control in your WPF application, you may have noticed that you can’t bind the control’s content. WebBrowser has no property to set its content but a method named NavigateToString. So when you’re following a strict MVVM approach you’re lost because you don’t want any code-behind for your views.

But then there are attached properties. As their name implies they allow you to attach new properties to existing dependency objects. In your XAML code you apply such a attached property to your element and can access it as any other property of the object.

Ok, first here’s the code of an attached property to set a WebBrowser’s content:

public class WebBrowserHelper {
    public static readonly DependencyProperty BodyProperty =
        DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("Body", typeof (string), typeof(WebBrowserHelper), new PropertyMetadata(OnBodyChanged));

    public static string GetBody(DependencyObject dependencyObject) {
        return (string) dependencyObject.GetValue(BodyProperty);
    }

    public static void SetBody(DependencyObject dependencyObject, string body) {
        dependencyObject.SetValue(BodyProperty, body);
    }

    private static void OnBodyChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e) {
        var webBrowser = (WebBrowser) d;
        webBrowser.NavigateToString((string)e.NewValue);
    }
}

The static BodyProperty defines the type of the attached property: its name is Body, the type is string, and whenever it is changed the method OnBodyChanged should be called.

The accessors for a attached property must be conventionally named SetXxx and GetXxx. They are called whenever you set or get the property’s value.

Last but not least OnBodyChanged is called when the value of the property has changed. The first parameter is the object the property is attached to, so we can cast it to WebBrowser and call its NavigateToString method.

The actual usage of the new Body property is pretty simple:

<WebBrowser
    src:WebBrowserHelper.Body="{Binding MyHtml}"
    />

given that the ViewModel has a property named MyHtml providing the desired content for the control.

A complete sample application is available on GitHub.