Binding for WPF Styles

If you want to replace the whole style (rather than just elements of it) then you’ll probably be storing those styles in resources. You should be able to do something along the lines of:

<Button>
    <Button.Style>
        <MultiBinding Converter="{StaticResource StyleConverter}">
            <MultiBinding.Bindings>
                <Binding RelativeSource="{RelativeSource Self}"/>
                <Binding Path="MyStyleString"/>
            </MultiBinding.Bindings>
        </MultiBinding>
    </Button.Style>
</Button>

By using a MultiBinding and using Self as the first binding we can then lookup resources in our converter. The converter needs to implement IMultiValueConverter (rather than IValueConverter) and can look something like this:

class StyleConverter : IMultiValueConverter 
{
    public object Convert(object[] values, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)
    {
        FrameworkElement targetElement = values[0] as FrameworkElement; 
        string styleName = values[1] as string;

        if (styleName == null)
            return null;

        Style newStyle = (Style)targetElement.TryFindResource(styleName);

        if (newStyle == null)
            newStyle = (Style)targetElement.TryFindResource("MyDefaultStyleName");

        return newStyle;
    }

    public object[] ConvertBack(object value, Type[] targetTypes, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

It’s not something I do very often, but that should work from memory 🙂