Question

I am currently developing a WinForms application in C# and require a table control that can contain other UI controls.

In the following example, I would like the Links column to contain link label controls:

| ID | Name |        Links        |
-----------------------------------
| 1  |  n1  | link1, link2, link3 |
| 2  |  n2  | link1               |

Is there one I can use ‘out of the box’, are there any good third party ones?

Thanks.

Answer 1

There isn’t a control that supports binding out of the box, but you can achieve similar results with the TableLayoutPanel, this is a container control.

It has the basic concepts of rows and columns (as well as row span and column span), however it does not have the concept of row headers, column sorting etc that you would get from a “grid” control – it is simply a layout driver.

The DataGridView can contain columns that contain custom controls, but there is a lot of faff involved in getting it to work – so doesn’t qualify as “out of the box”.

This is an example of putting a DateTimePicker into a DataGridView column.

Contrary to WinForms, WPF is built with the ability to compose controls inside other controls. This is a first class concept, in fact. The use of the structure XAML files for describing the UI naturally fits this composition model.

I would always argue choosing WPF over WinForms these days – unless the learning curve is too much and most of the experience is with WinForms.