WPF Tutorial

Since .NET 4.0, Microsoft is shipping a DataGrid control that provides all the basic functionality needed, like:

To show a basic data grid , just drop a DataGrid control to your view and bind the ItemsSource to a collection of data objects and you're done. The DataGrid provides a feature called AutoGenerateColumns that automatically generates column according to the public properties of your data objects. It generates the following types of columns:

Alternatively you can define your columns manually by setting the AutoGenerateColumns property to False. In this case you have to define the columns in the Columns collection of the data grid. You have the following types of columns available:

The data grid includes a variety of selection modes. They are configured by the SelectionMode and SelectionUnit property.

The data grid provides features to sort, reorder and resize columns. They can be enabled or disabled by the following properties:

The data grid also supports grouping. To enable grouping you have to define a CollectionView that contains to least one GroupDescription that defines the criterias how to group.

Second thing you need to do is defining a template how the groups should look like. You can do this by setting the GroupStyle to something like the following snippet.

The data grid provides a feature that shows a detail panel for a selected row. It can be enabled by setting a DataTemplate to the RowDetailsTemplate property. The data template gets the object that is bound to this row passed by the DataContext and can bind to it.

You can specify a RowDetailsTemplateSelector that selects a data template according to the type or data that this row contains. To do this, create a type that derives from DataTemplateSelector and override the SelectTemplate method. In the items argument you get the data and you can determine which data template to display. Return an instance of that data template as return value.

You can define a an AlternatingRowBackground that is applied every even row. You can additionally specify an AlternationCount if you only want to ink every every n-th data row.

The data grid also supports the feature to freeze columns. That means they stay visible while you scoll horizontally through all columns. This is a useful feature to keep a referencing column like an ID or a name always visible to keep your orientation while scrolling.

To freeze a numer of columns just set the FrozenColumnCount property to the number of columns you want to freeze.

You can control the visibility of row and column headers by setting the HeadersVisibility property to either None,Row,Column or All

If you want to autogenerate columns using AutoGenerateColumns="True", you cannot use CellTemplates, because the DataGrid autogenerates either a text, combo, hyperlink or checkbox column, but none of these are templateable. A simple workaround is to hook into the autogeneration, cancel it and always create a DataGridTemplateColumn. The following snippet shows the idea (the code is just a draft):

FieldName | Field Value Sex | Radio Button to select Male or Female Age | Drop Down Combo box to select age from 1 to 100 Name | Text box is Employed | Check box to indicate whether employed or not

And another biggest challenge is I need to have Event on each FieldValue cell. Event could be click, double click, Right mouse click, Enter etc. Thank you Shail

public class Phone:INotifyPropertyChanged { private int _homeNumber; private int _celNumber; private int _workNumber; private int _faxNumber; . . . }

I want to display ;Phone; values on a dataGrid, preferibly in a comboboxCell, I just want to display them, not edit them

thanks

public class Phone:INotifyPropertyChanged { private int _homeNumber; private int _celNumber; private int _workNumber; private int _faxNumber; . . . }

I want to display ;Phone; values on a dataGrid, preferibly in a comboboxCell, I just want to display them, not edit them

thanks

It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's very powerfull once you understand how to use it.