Elegant Grid

What's New in Elegant Grid v4.2

• Provided compatibility with the latest version of common controls shared with Elegant Ribbon.
• Localized More colors text to different languages.

Bug Fixes

• ColorCell did not apply the selected color from the More colors dialog.
• Setting BoundsGridControl.DataSource to null caused a NullReferenceException.

What's New in Elegant Grid v3.8
This release introduces a number of new themes and makes Elegant Grid fully compatible with Elegant Ribbon in terms of themes and licensing.

• Added the following visual themes: Office 2010 Blue, Office 2010 Black, Office 2010 Silver, Windows7 and Office 2010 TP (Technical Preview).
• Visual Studio 2010 is now supported.

What's New in V1.3

• Added ExportToTabDelimitedText, ExportToHtml, ExportToExcel methods to the grid GridControlBase class - which allow you to export data from the bound, unbound and virtual grid to a file or a stream in the following formats:
• Tab-delimited text
• HTML table
• Microsoft Excel XML workbook
• Added an article on exporting data from the grid
• Added an Export demo to the SimpleDemos sample
• Added a set of classes and properties implementing the functionality of a header column: RowHeaderColumn, EnableRowHeaderFocusMarker and EnableRowHeaderCellEditingMarker properties of the GridControlBase class and RowHeaderCell, RowHeaderCellStyle, ColumnHeaderRowHeaderCell, ColumnHeaderRowHeaderCellStyle, RowHeaderColumn classes
• Added a cell tooltip - You can turn on tooltips for cells by setting the GridControlBase.EnableCellExpandTip property to true
• Added a BoundGridControl.ExpandGroupRowsAfterGrouping flag indicating whether group rows should be expanded after being regrouped
• Changed the signature of the BoundGridControl.EnsureVisibleVerticallyByDataSourceItem method, which now returns the Row object that has become visible
• Added two BoundGridControl.StartCellEditByDataSourceItem overloaded methods, which allow you to start editing a cell by a given data source item
• Added BoundGridControl.UseEnterToTraverseRows property indicating whether hitting the Enter key should set the focus to the cell in next row and the same column
• Updated the documentation to reflect the changes made to the API

Data Bound Grid
The Elegant Grid provides full support for data binding to objects of different types, including instances of standard types such as DataSet, DataTable, DataView, IList, and IBindingList. Flexible column mapping allows you to display data from a table different from the primary table bound to the grid, which is especially useful when you are working with tables linked by relations and want to display meaningful values instead of IDs. Smart memory management, when only visible cell and row objects are instantiated using a memory pool for fast allocation/deallocation, dramatically reduces grid creation time and memory usage overhead. Mixed bound and unbound data in one grid. Data binding to jagged arrays.

Unbound Grid
You can work with grid objects without binding to any data source. In this case, you have absolute control over the grid's contents by adding, removing, and modifying rows, cells and other grid elements. Built-in tree grid-like functionality with nested group rows and data rows allows you to group and display data in a logical and structured way. Support for adding rows to group rows on-the-fly.

Virtual Grid
Ideal solution when you need to present data from a data source of huge size, for example, when you have millions of records in your data table.

Data Sorting and Grouping
The bound grid supports multiple criteria sorting and grouping. You can additionally show a Microsoft Outlook-like Group by Box to enable the end user to perform grouping by drag-and-dropping items. Sorting and grouping by cell display values is supported. You can define your custom comparison criterion by using a particular event.

Data Visualization and Editing
The following cell types are available for displaying and editing data: text, numeric, date/time, image, combo box, check box, color, and progress bar. Each cell supports an image and two buttons (ellipsis, check box, or drop-down) embedded in the left and/or right side of the cell contents. You can customize the look and feel of every particular visual element of a cell using a set of cell styles and events. When editing, data validation is supported, which allows you to subscribe to validation events and implement complete control over the data entry process. Alternatively, any of Windows Forms controls can be used as a data editor.

Column and Row Layout
The end user can resize, reorder, or hide columns by using drag-and-drop or you can control their width, position and visibility programmatically. The row height is determined automatically by measuring the contents. You can also make the row height of a fixed size independently of the actual contents or implement your custom measuring logic. Three types of left indent are supported: indent for all the rows, indent for data rows relative to their group row, and indent for group rows relative to their parent row.

Scrolling, Focus and Selection

• Full control over row selection
• Handy ways of controlling a vertical/horizontal scroll position in bound and unbound mode
• Handy ways of controlling the focused item and how the focused item looks
• Easy-to-use multiple selection in your code

Controlling Appearance
You can finely customize the way any cell looks and acts using the multi-level cell style mechanism. A variety of style properties can be tweaked at the grid level, at the column/row level, and at the cell level. Final style property values are calculated with inheritance rules. The Elegant Grid provides support for drawing each visual element using Windows theme support libraries, which allows the end-user to freely apply any third-party themes and theme tweakers. Each color filled area can be drawn with a custom graphic texture glyph. Appearance settings for a particular grid instance can be saved to a skin file and then loaded to any other grid instance. Built-in skins include:

• Windows XP Blue
• Windows XP Olive Green
• Windows XP Silver
• Office 12 Luna Blue
• Office 12 Obsidian

Miscellaneous
The full design-time support in the Windows Forms Designer allows you to tune up the grid in a convenient and well known way. Each class is designed to allow you to extend the existing features both by subscribing to events and by inheriting from the classes implementing the Elegant Grid object model. The Allow Unsafe Code Blocks option is always set to false for the grid code, which allows the host application to be run with minimum security permissions.