Datagrid control

While WPF includes a basic DataGrid, it often lacks the advanced features and flexibility required for complex enterprise applications. The investment in these libraries quickly pays off through saved development time, smoother implementation, and fewer headaches compared to building these functionalities yourself. Over time, we’ve moved from basic .NET datagrids provided by the framework to requiring more advanced features and solutions across a much wider span of frameworks. Open-source and third-party component vendors have filled in the gaps left open by the core .NET framework. If you consider the costs of developing the features yourself versus buying off-the-shelf, you’ll often find that third-party libraries pay for themselves for the saved time and resources.

If you’re looking for more advanced features that fall into the analysis category, you’ll find more of these features built into third-party datagrids, as you can see below. A built-in feature typically means that it’s enabled with very little code — often by setting just one property. From the start, developers ran into limitations with the standard .NET controls. The example in the attached source code presents a UI for editing the Customer table.

Note also that because the validation error does not relate to an individual property of our business object, none of the DataGrid cells are highlighted. In order to make the failure more obvious, the style of the row has been modified to add a red border. The XAML below demonstrates how a master / detail view may be achieved. A second data source is added, again via the ObjectDataProvider, with the window displaying two DataGrids, each bound to their respective data sources.

Next, create a ViewModel class that will serve as the intermediary between the View (DataGrid) and the Model. The ViewModel should expose the data to be displayed in the DataGrid. For coded examples using Windows Forms, check out our previous article, The Definitive Guide to WinForms Datagrids. Some ASP.NET features considered “built-in” require minimal JavaScript, such as a format function.

1. Next, create a ViewModel class that will serve as the intermediary between the View (DataGrid) and the Model.
2. From its humble origins, the .NET datagrid has transformed into a versatile yet complex software component because of technological advancements and evolving business requirements.
3. This guide aims to help you understand the core concepts and components of Xceed Data Grid and guide you through the process of integrating it into your WPF applications.
4. You can now build and run the application to see the datagrid in action.
5. These runtime features on the client were continuously improved over time with the help of JavaScript and jQuery.

When declaring the DataGrid in code behind, a default view must be set. See the Advanced DataGrid page for a list of differences between the Toolkit’s datagrid and the advanced edition, Xceed DataGrid for WPF. You may be prompted to visit the company’s website to start the trial, or it may be configured to work with just the NuGet Package. FlexGrid will automatically install and start a 30-day free trial from its NuGet build script.

A detailed overview of binding groups can be found on Vincent Sibal’s blog, and their usefulness extends far beyond that of validating DataGrid rows. In this article, I demonstrated how to use a DataGrid control in WPF, set its properties and display data using an object collection. I also discussed how to format rows, columns, their visibility, and scrolling. We also saw, how to make rows read-only and set selection mode property.

Add to that the datagrid’s zero-lag data virtualization, and you have the fastest WPF datagrid around. The DataGrid control looks a lot like the ListView, when using a GridView, but it offers a lot of additional functionality. For instance, the DataGrid can automatically generate columns, depending on the data you feed it with. The DataGrid is also editable by default, allowing the end-user to change the values of the underlying data source. While Telerik RadGridView for WPF offers rich UI features, deep customization often requires more code and understanding of the larger ecosystem, making it a bit cumbersome.

Step 4: Build and Run

UI controls are generally data agnostic and do not care where the data comes from, but you will need to convert the data to some collection type that the datagrid control recognizes. In .NET, there is a large array (pun intended) of data types that can be used with datagrids, including List, CollectionView, and ObservableCollection. And, of course, even basic datagrid controls for newer web frameworks in addition to WinUI and .NET MAUI. A second version of the DataGrid control, now named GridView, was also developed for web applications written with ASP.NET. Web applications originally didn’t have the full power of native desktop applications, so inline editing was not easily feasible. Editing was limited to one row at a time, typically with an edit button column that would transform each row into several textboxes and submit all edits as a batch response to the server.

Adding Xceed Data Grid to Your WPF Project

1. For a thorough DataSet tutorial, I would recommend this Data Access Layer tutorial.
2. Perceived performance is greatly enhanced thanks to a fully animated and fluid experience.
3. If these column types do not fulfill your needs, either in read-only mode or when the cells are in edit mode, then you can define your own column type using templates.
4. Navigate to the Xceed Data Grid for WPF product page and click on the “Download” button.

Microsoft defined more run-time events, also known as “callbacks,” to extend the behavior and adjust the look and feel of the grid at runtime. The ObservableCollection class is a good candidate for our data binding needs. It exposes a CollectionChanged event which is fired whenever items are added or removed from the collection. If we copy our customer data into an ObservableCollection and bind this to the DataGrid, we can handle the CollectionChanged event and perform the required operation on the DAL. The following code snippet shows how the CustomerObjectDataProvider (which is defined as an ObjectDataProvider in the XAML) constructs an ObservableCollection of CustomerUIObjects. These UI objects simply wrap their data object counterparts in order to expose the same properties.

Editing, Printing, Exporting

It added grouping and row details, providing a cleaner way to organize data. It supports sorting by multiple columns, and its cell template design made it much easier to customize cell contents, such as conditional formatting and custom cell editors. As you can probably tell, the most complex part of this scenario is just obtaining your data collection. The data collection could come from a web service, SQL Server, JSON file, or anywhere.

Industry’s Best WPF Datagrid Control

By following the MVVM pattern and leveraging the capabilities of the DataGrid control in WPF, you can create dynamic and interactive data-driven applications. This example serves as a starting point for mastering the usage of DataGrid in WPF using C# and MVVM. From its humble origins, the .NET datagrid has transformed into a versatile yet complex software component because of technological advancements and evolving business requirements. Because of its complexity, you must peel back the layers to better understand the control. For details of how this style was assembled, download the article source and pick apart the code. There is nothing special in there, just the usual application of styles and cut-n-paste control template https://traderoom.info/displaying-data-in-tables-with-wpf-s-datagrid/ modification.