My goal was to bind a WPF ContextMenu located in a ListBox to a command the MVVM way without any code-behind. I thought this should be a trivial thing. I was totally wrong. After spending several hours googling for a solution and failing to apply every single of them, I decided to ask guidance to my friend Mathieu who is a WPF genius. He found a cool solution which I publish here for the benefit of community.

My message to Mathieu:

I'm going crazy with a problem of ContextMenu in a ListBox. I am not able to bind a command to a context menu. I did a small project to reproduce my problem. I have a listbox bound on a view model. In this model I have a command that displays a message with the items selected from the list. I bound this command to three elements: a menu item in a menu bar, a button in a tool bar and finally a menu item the listbox context menu. The binding of the context menu does not work but it works for two other elements. I'm really desperate. It seems to be a known problem because the context menu is not in the visual tree. I am looking for a solution without code-behind and the ones I found on the web does not work for me (or I do not understand how they work). Therefore I ask your help when you have the time.

Thank you.

Manuel

His reply with the solution:

This was not an easy one. I had to Google and try a lot. But I found a solution that works perfectly and reasonably concise. I "pushed" the solution in your Git repo. Below is the new XAML with the changes.

In short, as the ContextMenu is not part of the visual tree, it is very difficult to bind the ListBox from it. So I inverted a few conventions and I passed the ListBox in the DataContext of the ContextMenu. Then I am able find the command in the view model by accessing the DataContext of the ListBox. The clue I found on Google is to use the ContextMenu property PlacementTarget to access the ListBox. This is slightly twisted, but once you think about it, it's not that complicated.

Happy coding!

Mathieu

<Window x:Class="WpfListContextMenu.MainWindow" 
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
        xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
        xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" mc:Ignorable="d"
        xmlns:local="clr-namespace:WpfListContextMenu"
        d:DataContext="{d:DesignInstance IsDesignTimeCreatable=True, Type=local:MainWindowViewModel}" 
        Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="268">
  <Grid>
    <DockPanel>
      <Menu DockPanel.Dock="Top">
        <MenuItem Header="Show Selected" Command="{Binding ShowSelectedCommand, Mode=OneWay}"
                  CommandParameter="{Binding SelectedItems, ElementName=listBox}" />
      </Menu>
      <ToolBar DockPanel.Dock="Top">
        <ToolBar.Header>
          <Button Content="Show Selected" Command="{Binding ShowSelectedCommand, Mode=OneWay}"
                  CommandParameter="{Binding SelectedItems, ElementName=listBox}"/>
        </ToolBar.Header>
      </ToolBar>
      <ListBox x:Name="listBox" DockPanel.Dock="Top" ItemsSource="{Binding Items}" DisplayMemberPath="Name"
               SelectionMode="Extended">
        <ListBox.ContextMenu>
          <ContextMenu DataContext="{Binding Path=PlacementTarget, RelativeSource={RelativeSource Self}}">
            <MenuItem Header="Show Selected" Command="{Binding Path=DataContext.ShowSelectedCommand}"
                      CommandParameter="{Binding Path=SelectedItems}" />
          </ContextMenu>
        </ListBox.ContextMenu>
      </ListBox>
    </DockPanel>
  </Grid>
</Window>