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What’s new in BinaryCombobox .NET V2.2.184?

NEW - The multi-column view now supports customising the column header text forecolor.

NEW - A new property introduced to set whether the control will display blank text in its text display area at the start, until the user selects an item from the drop-down list.

FIX- The SelectedIndexChanged event was firing twice when in a particular scenario - i.e. whenever the control's data source was reset dynamically or its ValueMember/ DisplayMember property value was changed at run-time. This issue is now fixed.

What’s new in BinaryCombobox .NET V2.2.154?

• NEW - "Sorting", "grouping" and complex data "filtering" capable multi-column display mode, with full support for complex data-binding - BinaryComboBox .NET supports data views. Apart from the fact that you can filter and sort data yourself by supplying filtered data to the control via the data-binding, the control also supports filtering, sorting and grouping by your users, when the control is in its multi-column data view mode. The filtering feature supports two modes of data filtering:
  • Built-in filter, and
  • Custom expression based filtering.
• Your users will be able to create "query expressions" in the Custom expression based filtering mode, and filter data themselves, on top of the filtered data that you may have provided in your application via the control's data-binding. With Custom expression mode filtering, your users can write "easy to write" expressions, to perform multiple levels of data filtering. The built-in filtering mode supports filtering data on a user specified/chosen column in the control's multi-column listview. The control also provides support to let the developer decide whether or not, to allow this extended user-interface of filtering, sorting and data grouping facility. This feature can be optionally enabled/disabled by the user through a context menu or by using the UI controls in the filtering/grouping panel.
• NEW - Data exporting / reporting - The control, in its multi-column mode, can let the users to export/save the view data into a CSV output file. This feature can also be enabled/disabled, by simply setting a property setting. This option can be enabled both using the UI controls, as well as through a context menu.
• NEW - Localised strings supported when displaying busy state / no data found state messages
• NEW - It is now possible to set color for drawing the sorting glyph in the multicolumn mode
• NEW - It is now possible to set color for drawing the controls drop-down arrow color

What’s new in BinaryCombobox .NET V2.1.257?

• NEW - UI enhancements to display message to indicate processing status.
• NEW - Minor changes to natively support the control's hosting in the specialised BinaryComboBox column in the product BinaryTreeListView .NET.
• NEW - All important properties of the control are now available in the control's design-time designer actionlist(smart tags). With this feature in place, the users won't need to write a single line of code including for complex databinding. The control comes with strong design-time support. For enabling easy setup of all crucial and important properties, the control implements custom code to support displaying these properties via the design-time smart tags UI - i.e. the designer actions list pop-up. The list includes properties, for example, for you to easily complex bind the control to an IBindingList datasource. With this design time infrastructure in place, you will not need to write a single line of code to get the controls working for you.
• NEW - Header/ Footer rendering can be optionally disabled. BinaryComboBox .NET multi-column drop-down list can now be configured to be displayed without the header and footer areas.

Features include:

Multi-column drop-down list - BinaryComboBox .NET supports a multi-column drop down list mode. All you will need to do is set DropStyleIsMultiColumn property, and the control will instantly support data display in multi-column drop-down list mode.

Multi-column drop-down list feature supports both ComboBox DropDown style as well as DropDownList style. This feature allows you the choice of either selecting items directly from the multi-column drop-list or to type in directly to the combobox. This comes handy when your users know what they are typing in and don't have to necessarily use the multi-column drop-list (although they still can).

When the control is not bound to a data source, or there is no data in the attached datasource to display, then the control displays a pretty-looking drop-down window, displaying message to the user, to let them know that the control does not have any data to display at that point in time, when the user clicks on the drop-down button. Rather than to display an empty window to indicate there is no data to display, a pretty-looking window displaying a no-data-available message, makes the UX enjoyable.  This message text is configurable by the developer, via a property setting on the control.

Data binding - BinaryComboBox .NET supports both data-bound and unbound modes, both in its standard (single column) and multi-column drop-down data display modes.  The databinding support includes working with DataSources implementing interfaces IList, IListSource and IBindingList. Data-binding to multi-column mode is made extremely simple, especially with the new custom design-time designer action list feature. You won't need to write a single line of code to databind and even to complex databind the control. Of course, to enable the other more advanced features in multi-column display mode, like grouping of data, plugging-in your own IComparer implementation for custom sorting of columns, etc, there are other relevant properties to set.  But all that is needed is setting up some properties, typically, without even leaving your IDE's designer.

Advanced Sorting capabilities:

a) Sorting on string:

The control exposes properties and events to support advanced sorting capability for sorting data in the columns (while the control is in multi-column style).  Apart from the default built-in sorter implementation, you could choose to plug-in your own IComparer implementation to sort any type of column data.

b) Sorting on numbers:

For example, you could choose to plug-in your custom IComparer implementation to sort a given column whose data you judge to be of, say, percentage types, or belonging to a particular category type. The control exposes a property to pick your custom IComparer implementation, and at run-time will execute your custom sorting implementation for the given column.

The control also raises events while about to sort, so that you can even cancel (if need be) the sorting (on a given column) that is about to happen. You get that level of fine-grain control via properties and events in this control.

Data grouping based on columns - The control provides out-of-the-box support for grouping of data, while it is set up to run in multi-column data display mode. Via simple-to-use properties, you can set-up grouping-based multi-column data display, by specifying which column to group the data by, and the control will group the data based on that column and display the multi-column data view. By using the features of DataView object, you can filter your source data and assign the filtered data as the data source to the control and thereby be able to view just the filtered data, in the control's multi-column data display view. This feature, of course, is also available in the control's standard (single-column) data display mode.

Ability to Drag-and-drop of column headers - The control supports the drag-and-drop of column headers in the multi-column drop-list window, thereby allowing your users to visually re-position/re-order the columns.

Image Support - While in the image combobox mode, you can show images next to the items on the drop down list, in both normal and selected states of the control. User can specify size of the image to be drawn in the image combobox mode.  You are now relieved from the tedious pain of overriding various custom draw routines of ComboBox control. The control has the ability to draw a rectangle around the image. With a simple property setting, this rectangle drawing can be switched off.

ComboBox text AutoCompletion - The control automatically selects the best match of an item from the list, as you type in a text, saving time selecting items from a possible long drop-down list. Also, the control exposes a property, to let the user decide whether the AutoCompletion feature will be case-sensitive or not. A performance efficient routine has been added to support handling faster Auto-Completion, especially to cope-up with high-speed data entry users. AutoCompletion feature is available on Data-bound mode as well. The control supports auto-completion of text in data-bound mode - where it will be able to retrieve any closely matching data items from the attached datasource, while you type-in text into BinaryComboBox control.

Read-only feature support - BinaryComboBox .NET supports a property called ComboBoxIsReadOnly , which when set to true, can set the Edit control portion of the ComboBox control to read-only mode! This feature lets your users to perform clipboard operations on the ComboBox text, while at the same time, blocking them from editing the combobox text.

Ability to cancel the drop-down list window - The control exposes an event to allow developers to take control and decide whether to allow the drop-down list window to be displayed or not. All you need to do is to subscribe to the event, and set your decision to allow/disallow the dropping/opening-up of the control's drop-down list window. The standard ComboBox control in the.NET Framework does not give you this capability out-of-the-box.

NotInList event - The control raises an event NotInList, whenever the user types-in text (item) into the control's text area and that text (item) is not available in the control's current list of items. This event is available for both the control's Multi-column drop-list mode and the standard mode.

Enhanced display styles supported - The control supports rendering two display styles:

• Windows Standard style: This will emulate the standard Windows ComboBox display style.
• Flat style: This is the VS.NET style "flat" combobox.

Switching between these two display styles is very easy - all you need to do is to just set one simple property.

Ability to fully support Control painting with custom colors (with Alpha-blending support) - Using the control's simple properties, you can set custom colors of your choice, for drawing the ComboBox as well as its drop-down list window and other aspects like, item hovering background color (standard / single column mode), etc., along with full support for "Alpha blending" of colors. The control also provides the capability for you to set an alpha-blending color factor of your choice, while setting the control's various color properties

Mouse hovering effects - When the input focus is not on the control, whenever the mouse focus moves over and out of the control, the control's borders are drawn and cleared respectively, giving a Visual Studio .NET style, control hovering effects.  If the property ShowBorderAlways is set to true, the control's border will be displayed irrespective of whether the control has input focus or otherwise.

Automatic support for a Drive List style - By setting the control's DriveList property, BinaryComboBox .NET control instantly becomes a system drive list, for your use.  Also, a special event has been defined to provide rich drive information for the selected drive item, when the combobox is set to DriveList style.

Automatic support for a Font List style - Setting the control's FontList property, instantly turns BinaryComboBox .NET control into a WYSIWYG (installed system fonts) font list combobox, for your immediate use.

Automatic support for emulating XP theme rendering - The control supports rendering XP theme colors automatically. Through a simple method in the control, you can ask the control to render itself with an emulated XP theme color of your choice, irrespective of the currently active XP theme. Since the XP theme emulation is custom drawn by the control, it should be possible to use this feature even in theme unaware OSs like Windows 2000 Operating system. Windows XP users: Just by setting a simple property, upon drag-and-drop of the control from the toolbox into your Windows Forms, the control will automatically identify the current active XP theme and will accordingly render itself with the appropriate color to emulate the active XP theme. Windows 2000 users: After instantiating the control, just make a call to a specially defined method in the control, by specifying a desired XP theme (defined as an enumeration), and the control will instantly render itself with appropriate colors to emulate that specified XP theme.

Automatic identification of the Operating system - The control exposes a property where you can specify whether the control should automatically identify the current Windows Operating system and accordingly render/draw itself (i.e standard style for Non-XP systems and flat style for XP systems).  However, you could also override the control rendering (drawing) styles deterministically, by using another simple to use property.