Presenting Data with the DataGridView Control in .NET 2.0—Programmatic DataGridView Construction

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

Programmatic DataGridView Construction

The most common way of using the grid is with data-bound columns. When you bind to data, the grid creates columns based on the schema or properties of the data items, and generates rows in the grid for each data item found in the bound collection. If the data binding was set up statically using the designer (as has been done in most of the examples in this book), the types and properties of the columns in the grid were set at design time. If the data binding is being done completely dynamically, the AutoGenerateColumns property is true by default, so the column types are determined on the fly based on the type of the bound data items. You may want to create and populate a grid programmatically when working with a grid that contains only unbound data. To know what code you need to write, you need to know the DataGridView object model a little better.

The first thing to realize is that like all .NET controls, a grid on a form is just an instance of a class. That class contains properties and methods that you can use to code against its contained object model. For DataGridView controls, the object model includes two collections—Columns and Rows—which contain the objects that compose the grid. These objects are cells, or more specifically, objects derived from instances of DataGridViewCell. The Columns collection contains instances of DataGridViewColumn objects, and the Rows collection contains instances of DataGridViewRows.