Pivot Anatomy

The Pivot is composed of two distinct sections: a header list and a PivotItem presenter (see Figure 11.4).

FIGURE 11.4 Anatomy of the Pivot.

The Pivot headers are displayed using a PivotHeadersControl. The active PivotItem has its header highlighted. Inactive PivotItems have their headers displayed until the headers exceed the width of the control. If there are too few headers to take up the full width of the control, the headers do not loop, and each header is displayed only once.

PivotItems are displayed using an ItemsPresenter. PivotItem is a ContentControl playing host to a single item of content. A ContentPresenter is used to display the content of the PivotItem.

Only PivotItem controls can be defined within the Pivot control. If you attempt to place another element type directly within the Pivot control, in XAML, an InvalidOperationException is thrown when the Pivot is initialized. This is contrary to the official Microsoft documentation on MSDN, which states that an element other than a PivotItem is implicitly wrapped into a PivotItem control.

The contents of a PivotItem control can either be specified in XAML, or added programmatically through the PivotItem’s Content property.