title: Best practice for parent/child-viewmodel-relationships in MVVM using Onyx?
body: <p>Hy guys!</p>
  
  <p>I am currently working on a little WPF project using MVVM via the Onyx framework.</p>
  
  <p>My currentview architecture is like this: </p>
  
  <p>    </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;DockPanel&gt;
      &lt;Menu DockPanel.Dock="Top" Background="#cecece"&gt;
          &lt;!-- Menu --&gt;
      &lt;/Menu&gt;
  
      &lt;Grid&gt;
          &lt;views:TranslationView x:Name="translationView" /&gt;
      &lt;/Grid&gt;
  &lt;/DockPanel&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p></p>
  
  <p>The question that I now have is how to implement the relationship between the two viewmodels. I currently basically just have the TranslationView have its own ViewModel with no link to the parent ViewModel. </p>
  
  <p>The problem is that I want to be able to open some file via the MainView and then parse the contents and display them in the TranslationView. Is there a recommended way to do this?</p>
  
  <p>I thought about just using the TranslationViewModel as a property in the MainViewModel and then using it as DataContext for the TranslationView but it kinda seems to run against Onyx's model to define the ViewModel through a type (not a object) reference.</p>