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Silverlight: Reading Text Files Using Open File Dialog in Silver Light

This document discusses how to use the OpenFileDialog API in Silverlight to select and display the contents of a text file. It describes creating a project with a button and textbox. Clicking the button opens a file dialog, and if a file is selected, its contents are read and displayed in the textbox. The code opens the selected file as a stream, reads it into a string, and sets the textbox's text property. This allows long text files to be viewed by scrolling in the textbox.

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Zain Shaikh
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713 views3 pages

Silverlight: Reading Text Files Using Open File Dialog in Silver Light

This document discusses how to use the OpenFileDialog API in Silverlight to select and display the contents of a text file. It describes creating a project with a button and textbox. Clicking the button opens a file dialog, and if a file is selected, its contents are read and displayed in the textbox. The code opens the selected file as a stream, reads it into a string, and sets the textbox's text property. This allows long text files to be viewed by scrolling in the textbox.

Uploaded by

Zain Shaikh
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Reading Text Files using OpenFileDialog in Silverlight

Introduction:

Silverlight 2 provides you with the OpenFileDialog API using which you can open
files of specific types such as, image files, text files and so forth.

In this article, you will see how to select and open a text file and display its
contents in a TextBox.

First, create a new Silverlight 2 project. Drag and drop a Canvas, TextBox and a
Button onto the Page.xaml, between the <Grid></Grid> tags.

Configure their properties as shown below:

<UserControl x:Class="FileDemo.Page"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="400" Height="300">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
<Canvas x:Name="canvasMain" Width="400" Height="300">
<TextBox x:Name="txtContents" AcceptsReturn="true" Canvas.Top="70" Canvas.Left="10"
Width="250" Height="100" VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Visible"></TextBox>
<Button x:Name ="btnSelect" Content="Select File" Canvas.Top="10" Canvas.Left="10"
Click="btnSelect_Click" ></Button>
</Canvas>
</Grid>
</UserControl>

The TextBox has its AcceptsReturn property set to true, which will render it as a
multiline text box. This will be useful to display the text file contents. The TextBox
also has its vertical scrollbar set so that if the file contents are large, the user can
scroll down to see them fully. An event handler has been associated with the Click
event of the Button. This event handler will be coded in Page.xaml.cs as shown
below:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using System.IO;

namespace FileDemo
{

public partial class Page : UserControl


{
private string contents;

public Page()
{
InitializeComponent();
}

private void btnSelect_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)


{
OpenFileDialog odlg = new OpenFileDialog();
odlg.Filter = "Text files|*.txt";
odlg.Multiselect = false;
if((bool)odlg.ShowDialog())
{
StreamReader reader= new StreamReader(odlg.File.OpenRead());
while (!reader.EndOfStream)
{
contents = reader.ReadToEnd();
}
txtContents.Text = contents;
reader.Close();
}
}
}
}

In the code within the event handler, an instance of OpenFileDialog is created and
its Filter and MultiSelect properties are set. To display the dialog, we use
ShowDialog method. If it returns a false, which means nothing was selected, we do
nothing. If a file was selected, we create a StreamReader for it and read its
contents into a string variable. Then we display the contents of this variable in the
text box.

To test the application, I copied the entire text of Page.xaml.cs into a text file
named Code.txt. Upon building and executing the application, the following output
was shown after I selected Code.txt:

Figure 1
As the text box displays scrollbars, you can scroll down.

After scrolling further, more code was shown as seen below:

Figure 2

Conclusion: In this article, you explored how to select and open a text file and
display its contents in a TextBox using OpenFileDialog in Silverlight.

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