Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion. I visited the DevExpress web site but couldn't see anything mentioned at that level that looked promising (I'd sort of be surprised if there was since it would not be a common framework requirement).

FWIW we took a close look at DevExpress (and the MM framework) when working with WinForms but at the time that we switched to WPF there did not seem to be a good fit for that technology. Now we are using EF, Prism and a strict MVVM regime a lot of the functionality we were looking for is already there (the big exception being a security framework ) . IAC we're too far down the road to refactor everything to use an existing framework :-{

Best,
Viv

>I vaguely remember there is something in the DevExpress controls that address this very thing. You might want to swing by their website. they are very responsive to queries. Might be worth considering as there is a lot of WPF stuff they handle that would be very time consuming to code yourself.
>
>
>Hi,
>>
>>First let me describe (in overly-simplistic terms) an existing VFP application.
>>
>>Say I have a table of 'Products'. The end-user can design a template specifying how information about each product should be displayed in a specific situation.
>>As a simple example they might specify three textboxes to hold the product name, description and price. The template would hold information on the position (top,left), size, font name and size, forecolor and background color. etc. with a table record for each box. This controls the standard display for each product. However the user may need to modify this slightly for specific products - for example to change the font or foreground color. When such an adjustment was made I was storing this information in a table with the same structure as the main template table using nulls for unchanged values and only populating columns which had changed. Thus, for any specific product I would load the base template then override it with the changes (if any). This meant that for a specific product the modified version 'inherited' from the base version so that subsequent changes to the base version will be in effect if not specifically changed in the modified version.
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>>In the WPF version the base template is defined as a Canvas and the user has vastly more flexibility in controlling the appearance - so much more, in fact, that defining a table to hold all the information would be impossible. Consequently I am storing the finished template by serializing it as a byte array. So far so good - BUT:
>>
>>If the user modifies this for a specific product the only simple thing I can do is to store the complete modified template. This means that any subsequent changes to the base template will not be reflected in any overridden example. What I'm looking for is an approach that, as in VFP, would only store the modified properties and allow the final template to still inherit from the base template where neccessary. The base template Canvas can contain multiple other Canvas objects each of which may also recursively contain other Canvases although it would be acceptable to prevent changes to this basic structure of the base template (i.e. user could only modify the properties of existing objects - not add or remove them entirely).
>>
>>Any suggestions?
>>(I had a vague idea that I might somhow use XAML and the 'value inheritance' capability of WPF but it won't come into focus :-{ )