Is WinUI.TableView suitable for AOT ?

[DiagProf]

First of all, thank you for the project.

I have a Winui3 application where I managed to set everything up so that it compiles AOT.

But now I'm failing with the WinUI.TableView.

As soon as I set PublishAot to true true I get this error:

ICustomProperty support used by XAML binding for type 'WinUI.TableView.TableViewRow' (property 'TableView') requires the type to marked with 'WinRT.GeneratedBindableCustomPropertyAttribute'. If this is a built-in type or a type that can't be marked, a wrapper type should be used around it that is marked to enable this support.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what I could do to solve the problem.

Attached is a small example project.

TableViewTest.zip

It would be nice if there was a solution. I just need the TableView as a display without any bells and whistles.
Thanks!

[DanielTrommel]

Not anything specifically on your error, but having worked a bit on the filter/sorting of TableView, it is good to know that reflection is being used to parse the binding path, to dynamically get the value for a cell, to be able to do sorting/filtering.

This bit would need attention, since not all reflection is allowed for AOT; https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/creating-aot-compatible-libraries/
And this code will get even more challenging with the improvement I proposed in this PR that dynamically compiles a function for this bit (to improve code and speed): #178

(!) My suggestion would be, to support AOT:

• in column definition, besides the Binding instance, allow a function Func<T,V> to also be passed
• that function is effectively the static code variant for the Binding
• ie: given the instance of type T, returns the value of the property to show in the column.

This would circumvent all of the reflection and dynamic code, but adds duplication (both Binding and this new explicit inputted function point to the same property) when creating a column definition.
In effect is a static version of the auto-generated function I proposed in this PR: #178
We could then allow this function to be inputted, and if not inputted, auto-generate ourselves. For AOT projects to work, you'd always need to provide the function.

To push this even further: a more elegant way to tackle this, is to develop a source generator in the TableView library, that design-time will generate the code (based on the provided Binding), to derive the column value / filter and sort code, so you end up with efficient, static code for AOT.

[licon4812]

I received this error as well. Even when Natice AOT was turned off.

For now, I have raised a PR with the annotation. Table works as expected

#209

[w-ahmad]

@licon4812 this mean your PR will resolve this issue as well?

[licon4812]

@w-ahmad My PR will only allow WinRT data bindings to work.

Unfortunately, I cannot speak for AOT as a whole