Presenting Data with the DataGridView Control in .NET 2.0—Using the Built-In Column Types

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Using the Built-In Column Types

Using a text box column is straightforward enough: you data bind to something that can be rendered as text, or set the Value property on a cell to something that can be converted to a string, and you are done. Using some of the other cell types may not be as easy to figure out, so this section steps through each of the built-in column types, pointing out its capabilities and how to use it.

The first thing to realize is that even though most of the functionality is surfaced at the cell level in a DataGridView and it can support spreadsheet-like behavior (as described later in this chapter), the grid is still primarily a tabular control. The columns in the grid usually represent information that can be determined at design time—specifically, the schema of the data that will be presented. The rows are usually determined dynamically at runtime and map to the structure specified by the columns. You may occasionally programmatically create columns for rendering based on dynamic data schemas at runtime, but even then you are first defining the data’s shape (the columns) and then providing the data (the rows).

As a result, for each of the built-in cell types that the grid is capable of displaying, there is a corresponding column type designed to contain cells of that type. Each cell type is derived from the DataGridViewCell class, and each of the corresponding column types is derived from DataGridViewColumn. Each of the column types expose properties to aid in the data’s data binding, and each column type corresponds to the expected content for the type of cells that the column contains. Likewise, each derived cell type may expose additional properties based on the type of content it is designed to display.

Because each built-in column type is different in subtle ways, it’s best to cover them one at a time. However, since all of the cell types contained by the column types derive from the same base class, there are a number of properties from the base class that you’ll use for controlling and accessing cell content. The properties of the DataGridViewCell base class are described in Table 6.1.