ContextMenu on tap instead of tap and hold

Question

I need to open up a menu and since WP7 is not designed to perform such actions, I am taking help of Toolkit. Following is the sample code:

<Border BorderThickness="3" Padding="6">
     <toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
         <toolkit:ContextMenu>
             <toolkit:MenuItem Header="item1" Click="Item1_Click" />
             <toolkit:MenuItem Header="item2" Click="Item2_Click" />
             <toolkit:MenuItem Header="item3" Click="Item3_Click" />
         </toolkit:ContextMenu>
     </toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
     <TextBlock Text="Tap" />
</Border>

Now this works fine as long as user does a press and hold action. But I can't ask the user for such action. I need to display the menu on a single click/tap/touch/gesture (watever you want to call it). Can someone please suggest? If you think toolkit is not the best way, then please suggest alternatives with sample code. I tried popup but that did more bad than good to my applicaiton

Answer 1

You could add GestureListener to the Border and subscribe to the Tap event. In the event handler, you get the ContextMenu for the Border and set IsOpen to true if it doesn't have a logical parent.

<Border BorderThickness="3" Padding="6">
    <toolkit:GestureService.GestureListener>
        <toolkit:GestureListener Tap="GestureListener_Tap" />
    </toolkit:GestureService.GestureListener>
    <toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
        <toolkit:ContextMenu>
            <toolkit:MenuItem Header="item1" Click="Item1_Click" />
            <toolkit:MenuItem Header="item2" Click="Item2_Click" />
            <toolkit:MenuItem Header="item3" Click="Item3_Click" />
        </toolkit:ContextMenu>
    </toolkit:ContextMenuService.ContextMenu>
    <TextBlock Text="Tap" />
</Border>

private void GestureListener_Tap(object sender, GestureEventArgs e)
{
    Border border = sender as Border;
    ContextMenu contextMenu = ContextMenuService.GetContextMenu(border);
    if (contextMenu.Parent == null)
    {
        contextMenu.IsOpen = true;
    }
}

Answer 2

If you want a context menu for your application, then the ContextMenu and ContextMenuService are the best approach to take because it is standard throughout third party and pre-installed applications. Users already understand the 'tap-and-hold' gesture, so working around that will be counter-intuitive.

If (for whatever reason) you must initiate a ContextMenu from a single tap, then you can always customize the source code for ContextMenu.cs from the Silverlight Toolkit so that instead of hooking the Hold event it hooks the Tap event.