Pivot control for Windows Phone 8

[ This article is for Windows Phone 8 developers. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation. ]

A Windows Phone pivot app provides a quick way to manage views or pages. It can be used for filtering large datasets, viewing multiple data sets, or switching app views. For example, flicking or panning left to right on the page advances to the next page of content.

This topic contains the following sections.

Pivot control overview

At the base of an app is a Pivot control that is essentially a container for a secondary control called a PivotItem control. The PivotItem controls contain individual page content such as controls, grids, or links inside each page. For more information about the Pivot control architecture, see Pivot control architecture for Windows Phone 8.

 

 

The Pivot control comes with built-in support for touch interaction and navigation. You do not have to implement any special gesture functionality in your app because it is enabled by default. The pivot control supports the following gestures and navigational effects:

  • Horizontal pan (tap and drag left/right)

  • Horizontal flick (tap and swipe quickly left/right)

  • Navigating hosted controls—for example, links can be tapped and lists can be scrolled

Pivot app features

The following table lists a selection of the supported features in a pivot app.

Feature

Description

Design-time experience

You can work with the design surface in Visual Studio or Blend for Visual Studio performing such actions as adding additional PivotItem controls and switching between item views.

Matching the Windows Phone pivot experience

Your app can look and react like the integrated Windows Phone pivot experiences.

Built-in flick and gesture support

The pivot app already provides gesture support for common navigation. You do not have to implement gestures such as drags, flicks, or taps in your app.

React to selection changed

Whenever a PivotItem is changed, or you can subscribe to the SelectionChanged event in your code to react to the change.

On-demand loading of content

To improve the performance of the pivot app, you can load Pivot control content on-demand as opposed to loading everything at startup.

Programmatically select which PivotItem is in view

You can programmatically select what PivotItem is in view for the user.

See Also

Other Resources

Pivot control design guidelines for Windows Phone

How to create a pivot app for Windows Phone 8

Panorama control for Windows Phone 8