When displaying a MahApps.Metro DropDownButton, it’s often easy to set a DisplayMemberPath, but what happens if you want something more complicated in your menu items than just the member text?

I tried a few things, which didn’t work:

• Setting the ItemTemplate naively will also break the main label of the DropDownButton.
• Putting DataTemplates inside the DropDownButton.Resources tag didn’t seem to get picked up.
• Setting the template from the item container style worked, but broke the MenuItem template, causing a lot of ugly XAML duplication from the default WPF MenuItem to make it look consistent

What finally did work was setting the ItemTemplate to a ContentPresenter, whose Resources section then decided which template to use:

<Metro:DropDownButton.ItemTemplate>
    <DataTemplate>
        <ContentPresenter Content="{Binding}">
            <ContentPresenter.Resources>
                <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type ViewModels:MyViewModel}">
                    <!-- Insert your custom template here, icons, etc. -->
                </DataTemplate>
                <DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type System:String}">
                    <!-- Template for the default item on the button (i.e. the button content before
                        opening the menu) -->
                    <TextBlock Text="{Binding}"/>
                </DataTemplate>
            </ContentPresenter.Resources>
        </ContentPresenter>
    </DataTemplate>
</Metro:DropDownButton.ItemTemplate>

This trick may also work with ContextMenu but I haven’t tried it.