What is a good pattern for sharing data between related views?.
I have an application where 1 form contains many small views, each views behaves independently from each other more or less (they communicate/interact via an event bus). Every so often I need to pass the same objects to the child views. Sometimes I need this same object to be passed to a child view and then the child passes it onto another child itself contains.
What is a good approach to sharing this data between all the views contained within the parent form (view) ?
I have looked into CAB and their approach and every "view" has a "root work item" this work item has dictionary that contains a shared "state" between the views that are contained.
Is this the best approach? just a shared dictionary all the views under a root view can access?
My current approach right now is to have a function on the view that allows one to set the object for that view. Something like
view.SetCustomer(Customer c);
then if the view contains a child view it knows to set it on the child view ala:
this.childview1.SetCustomer(c);
The application is written in C# 3.5, for winforms using MVP with structure map as a IoC/DI provider.
Josh Smith and Marlon Grech use the mediator pattern with an implementation that uses weak references to prevent memory leaks. Check this out:
http://marlongrech.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/mediator-v2-for-mvvm-wpf-and-silverlight-applications/