Use a enum as ItemsSource with RadComboBox

Recently, I encountered a situation where I needed to display an enum in a WPF RadComboBox. There may be various approaches to this, but I will just describe the one that was applicable to my situation.

First of all you’ll need to define your enum. We will use the ‘Display’ attribute to access the property DisplayName later in our XAML code.

public enum MaterialUnit
{
    [Display(Name = "Piece")]
    Piece = 0,
    [Display(Name = "Box")]
    Box = 1,
    [Display(Name = "Roll")]
    Roll = 2,
    [Display(Name = "Meter")]
    Meter = 3
}

Next, in your view model, we need to define a list which will bind to the ‘ItemsSource’ property of our ‘RadComboBox’ control. If ‘_unitTypes’ was not yet initialized, we will initialize it with one simple line.

private IEnumerable<MaterialUnit> _unitTypes;
public IEnumerable<MaterialUnit> UnitTypes => _unitTypes ?? (_unitTypes = Telerik.Windows.Data.EnumDataSource.FromType<MaterialUnit>());

Finally, now go to your XAML code, and add the following:

<telerik:RadComboBox
    ItemsSource="{Binding UnitTypes}"
    DisplayMemberPath="DisplayName" <!-- Display Attribute - Name Property -->
    SelectedValuePath="Value"
    SelectedValue="{Binding SelectedMaterialUnit}" />

The property ‘SelectedMaterialUnit’ is of type MaterialUnit, and stores the enum value that is selected.