CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netwinformsdatagridview
Barry
Barry

Reputation: 2063

DataGridView complex binding

I want to bind columns in a DataGridView to pull values from two different classes. My application is in WinForms.

I have a data structure like this:

Class A
    Number As Integer
    Items as List(Of Class B)
End Class

Class B
    Number as Integer
    Value as Double
End Class

I need to be able to display this in a DataGridView with the first column being A.Number and subsequent columns being each item in the Items list. 

Items
1     1-1.5     2-2.0     3-3.6
2     1-1.0     2-3.9     3-4.2
.
.
.

The only suggestion I've had so far that seemed workable in a short period of time was to convert this to a datatable and bind that, but this seems very ugly.

Thanks for the help!

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1163

Answers (2)

Don Kirkby
Don Kirkby

Reputation: 56650

Several times, I've had a data grid that I wanted to pull columns from a couple of different places. The easiest technique I found was to create a display class that is just a bunch of getter methods to navigate some object model. Then I bind to that display class.

In this example, you'd have to do something like this:

Class ADisplay
    private A target
    public ADisplay(A target)
        Me.target = target
    End

    public property Number
        return target.Number
    End

    public property Item0
        return FormatItem(0)
    End

    public property Item1
        return FormatItem(1)
    End
    ...
    private Function FormatItem(i as Integer) As String
        B item = target.Items(i)
        ' Now format that item
        ...

Sorry, my VB.NET is very rusty, but I hope it's clear enough for you to get the idea.

Upvotes: 1

Rafal Spacjer
Rafal Spacjer

Reputation: 4918

If you need to do very complex (and probably strange) things with datagrid then you can use SourceGrid as a control. It's very flexible and it allows you to do almost everything with grid.

Upvotes: 0

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