Expression Blend Pro Tip: Add your own sample data lists
Posted: Saturday, March 06, 2010 5:55 PM
by
Barry Gervin
Filed under: Silverlight, Blend
Expression Blend (3 and higher) lets you create Sample Data Sources, and for each property, select a data type and sample data format, such as Lorem ipsum, Colors, Company Names, Names, etc. It’s a nice list, which is great for prototyping. However, if you want to add to this list of types, or just edit the potential values for each type, you can do edit a simple csv file.
In your Blend program directory, you will find a “SampleDataResources” folder. Inside this you will find an Images folder (in case you don’t set your own folder when creating a property) and a Data folder that stores the sample string data.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Expression\Blend 3\SampleDataResources\en\Data
You can edit this file in excel and simply edit the values or even add new columns.
Windows 7 or Vista doesn’t find it cool to be editing any file underneath your Program Files folder, so you’ll either need to copy the file out to yoru documents folder and edit it there, and copy it back, or run excel with elevated admin privileges.