Logical and Visual Trees
When you create a user interface in Avalonia, you are creating a tree of controls, for example:
The tree is known as the Logical Tree. Controls in Avalonia however are made up of other, more primitive controls. A CheckBox for example might consist of a border, a check mark and a piece of text. These controls also make up a tree, which is called the Visual Tree.
Logical Tree
The logical tree contains the controls that you place in a Window or UserControl, together with controls that are created from DataTemplates and containers created by ListBox, TreeView etc. In addition:
- Inheritable
AvaloniaPropertyvalues are inherited along the logical tree - Styles are applied along the logical tree
- Events are propagated along the logical tree
- Control name lookup is done along the logical tree
The logical tree can be traversed by the following means:
- A control's logical parent is exposed via the
Parentproperty - The logical children of a control are stored in the protected
LogicalChildrencollection for derived controls - Casting a control to
ILogicalexposes a number of properties that expose the logical tree - A set of extension methods in the
Avalonia.LogicalTreenamespace that provide LINQ-style traversal
Note that although controls can be added to or removed from the LogicalChildren collection by derived classes, this can be rather error-prone. It's probably best to derive from one of the existing controls that handle this for you, such as:
Decoratorfor a control that hosts a single child controlPanelfor a control that hosts multiple child controlsContentControlfor a control that needs to display data according to aDataTemplate
The logical tree can behave in unintuitive ways at times. See this blog post for some gotchas to look out for when working with it.
Visual Tree
The visual tree contains the controls in the logical tree, plus the controls that are created by a templated control's ControlTemplate. In addition:
- The application is rendered by traversing the visual tree
- Layout is carried out along the visual tree
- Hit testing is done along the visual tree
The visual tree can be traversed by the following means:
- Casting a control to
IVisualexposes a number of properties that expose the visual tree - A set of extension methods in the
Avalonia.VisualTreenamespace that provide LINQ-style traversal