Applying ItemContainerStyle Recursively

In the MenuKiller Control, I need to configure a TreeView to quite some extent: I want all nodes to have a certain custom ItemContainerStyle.

First naive approach: The TreeView will apply its ItemContainerStyle to all nodes. Wrong! The TreeViewItems themselves are ItemControls, therefore having their own ItemContainerStyle.

Second approach: Have the ItemContainerStyle refer to itself using a DynamicResource:

<Style x:Key="MKItemStyle" TargetType="{x:Type local:MenuKillerItem}">
    <Setter Property="Template" Value="{StaticResource MenuKillerItemTemplate}"/>
    <Setter Property="ItemContainerStyle" Value="{DynamicResource MKItemStyle}"/>
</Style>

Wrong again! This does not work. Frankly, I don’t know why, but I didn’t bother to debug it.

There are quite some articles on customizing TreeViews the net, for example Josh Smith’s article “Custom TreeView Layout in WPF” at the CodeProject. There didn’t seem to be any such problem… So what’s the catch?

A Simple Solution?

So what is it all about? In the source code accompanying Josh’s article, we find the following declaration:

<!-- This Style redefines the ControlTemplate used by TreeViewItems and
       also provides a different itemspanel for their child items. -->
<Style TargetType="TreeViewItem">
  [...]
</Style>

So this will simply apply the defined style to each and every item of the TargetType.
Done!.

There are some drawbacks, though: In a small application, this might be OK, but it may result in problems with larger applications or control libraries. One simple trick, of course, is to create a custom control which derives from the control you want, and apply a default style to this derived type (I currently do this for the MenuKillerItem, which derives from TreeViewItem).

Yet, this solution is not well-templateable either. Users of a control library might want to override the default template only for children of a specific control, which is not possible this way.

Of course, one can write a recursive method to apply the style, but I doubt this is the cleanest solution. Any better ideas?

Related posts:

1. The MenuKiller Control – Differentiated UX
2. Custom DependencyProperties and “Auto”
3. A MenuKiller Control – Draft