HowTo: Clear contents of Silverlight’s RichTextBox control

Was just debugging an issue with loading of saved state at ClipFlair’s Text component, when I realized that Silverlight’s (and WPF’s) RichTextBox control doesn’t accept an empty string at its Xaml proprerty to clear its contents as one would expect. Instead clearing the contents of the RichTextBox requires a call to Blocks.Clear().

In ClipFlair’s case, the Text component (a FloatingWindow descendent) hosts a SilverTextEditor control, which in turn hosts a RichTextBox named rtb and has its own Xaml property, where I added the needed logic to clear the RichTextBox contents when getting a null or empty string. Wonder why Microsoft couldn’t do the same thing.

    public string Xaml     {
      get { return rtb.Xaml; }
      set { 
        if (value != null && value.Trim() != "") rtb.Xaml = value; 
        else rtb.Blocks.Clear(); 
      } //allows to set null or blank value to clear the RichTextBox

    }