WPF ListView confusing the SelectedItem with equal items

Question

A ListView (or ListBox) with following properties:

  <ListView SelectionMode="Single">
     <sys:String>James</sys:String>
     <sys:String>Claude</sys:String>
     <sys:String>Justing</sys:String>
     <sys:String>James</sys:String>
  </ListView>

will result in selecting two items simultaneously if I click on "James", even though I chose SelectionMode="Single". It's even the same behaviour when I use a helper class with a string-property to display in the ListView. It seems like the ListView is evaluating the Items and selecting those which are Equal() rather than ReferenceEqual(). Is there a way to change this behaviour so that the ListView treats every item individually?

Answer 1

In order to get the desired behavior, you will need to create a helper class that wraps the string type like this:

public class Item
{
    public Item(string name) { Name = name; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Using it, you can now do the following:

private ObservableCollection<Item> _items;

public MainWindow()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    _items = new ObservableCollection<Item>() { new Item("James"), new Item("John"), new Item("Steve"), new Item("Drew"), new Item("Andy"), new Item("James") };
    list.ItemsSource = _items;
}

with the XAML like this:

<ListView SelectionMode="Single" x:Name="list" DisplayMemberPath="Name" />