How to preserve the full state of the View when navigating between Views in an MVVM application?

I have an MVVM application that requires basic backward/forward navigation between screens. Currently, I have implemented this using a WorkspaceHostViewModel that tracks the current workspace and exposes the necessary navigation commands as follows.

public class WorkspaceHostViewModel : ViewModelBase
{
    private WorkspaceViewModel _currentWorkspace;
    public WorkspaceViewModel CurrentWorkspace
    {
        get { return this._currentWorkspace; }
        set
        {
            if (this._currentWorkspace == null
                || !this._currentWorkspace.Equals(value))
            {
                this._currentWorkspace = value;
                this.OnPropertyChanged(() => this.CurrentWorkspace);
            }
        }
    }

    private LinkedList<WorkspaceViewModel> _navigationHistory;

    public ICommand NavigateBackwardCommand { get; set; }
    public ICommand NavigateForwardCommand { get; set; }
}

I also have a WorkspaceHostView that binds to the WorkspaceHostViewModel as follows.

<Window x:Class="MyNavigator.WorkspaceHostViewModel"
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">

  <Window.Resources>
    <ResourceDictionary Source="../../Resources/WorkspaceHostResources.xaml" />
  </Window.Resources>

  <Grid>
    <!-- Current Workspace -->
    <ContentControl Content="{Binding Path=CurrentWorkspace}"/>
  </Grid>

</Window>

In the WorkspaceHostResources.xaml file, I associate the View that WPF should use to render each WorkspaceViewModel using DataTemplates.

<ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
                    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
                    xmlns:local="clr-namespace:MyNavigator">

  <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type local:WorkspaceViewModel1}">
    <local:WorkspaceView1/>
  </DataTemplate>

  <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type local:WorkspaceViewModel2}">
    <local:WorkspaceView2/>
  </DataTemplate>

</ResourceDictionary>

This works pretty well, but one disadvantage is that the Views are recreated between each navigation due to the mechanics of DataTemplates. If the view contains complex controls, like DataGrids or TreeViews, their internal state is lost. For example if I have a DataGrid with expandable and sortable rows, the expand/collapse state and sort order is lost when the user navigates to the next screen and then back to the DataGrid screen. In most cases it would be possible to track each piece of state information that needs to be preserved between navigations, but it seems like a very inelegant approach.

Is there a better way to preserve the entire state of a view between navigation events that change the entire screen?

Solution

I ended up adding an ActiveWorkspaces ObservableCollection property to the WorkspaceHostViewModel and binding an ItemsControl to it as follows.

<!-- Workspace -->
<ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Path=ActiveWorkspaces}">
    <ItemsControl.Resources>
        <BooleanToVisibilityConverter x:Key="BooleanToVisibilityConverter" />
    </ItemsControl.Resources>
    <ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>
        <ItemsPanelTemplate>
            <Grid/>
        </ItemsPanelTemplate>
    </ItemsControl.ItemsPanel>            
    <ItemsControl.ItemContainerStyle>
        <Style TargetType="{x:Type ContentPresenter}">
            <Setter Property="Visibility" Value="{Binding Visible, Converter={StaticResource BooleanToVisibilityConverter}}"/>
        </Style>
    </ItemsControl.ItemContainerStyle>
</ItemsControl>

The ActiveWorkspaces property contains all of the workspaces in the navigation history. They all get rendered on top of one another in the UI, but by binding the Visibility of their respective ContentPresenter I am able to show only one at a time.

The logic that manipulates the Visible property (which is a new property in the Workspace itself) exists in the navigate forward/backward commands.

This is a very similar approach to the solution proposed by Rachel and is in part based on the ItemsControl tutorial found on her web site; however, I opted to write the show/hide logic myself rather than rely on a subclassed TabControl to do it for me. I still feel that it would be possible to improve the show/hide logic. Specifically I would like to eliminate the Visible property from the Workspace class, but for now this works well enough.

UPDATE:

After using the above solution successfully for several months, I opted to replace it with the view-based navigation functionality provided by Prism. Although this approach requires much more overhead, the advantages greatly outweigh the effort involved. The general idea is to define Region's in your Views and then navigate by calling regionManager.RequestNavigate("RegionName", "navigationUri") in your ViewModel. Prism handles the legwork of instantiating, initializing and displaying your View in the specified Region. Additionally, you can control the lifetime of your View, whether or not it should be re-used upon subsequent navigation requests, what logic should be performed on navigation to and on navigation from events, and whether or not navigation should be aborted (due to unsaved changes in current View, etc.) Note that Prism view-based navigation requires a Dependency Injection Container (such as Unity or MEF) so you will likely need to incorporate this into your application architecture, but even without Prism navigation, adopting a DI container is well worth the investment.