Question

I am planning to show, or to say, dump a set of same objects in my application to user.

I need a control that after adding data to it, changing the data in a specific cell and row can be done programmatically.

At the moment I am using a ListView and I have populated it with my object like this:

My object is like:

public class TestData
{
public string Name {get;set;}
public double Force {get;set;}
public double PreTriggerVolt {get;set;}
public double PreTriggerCurr {get;set;}
public double TriggerVolt {get;set;}
public double TriggerCurr {get;set;}
public double PostTriggerVolt {get;set;}
public double PostTriggerCurr {get;set;}
}

The Type column is hard coded by myself in the ListView 😛

I will have a lot of this in the table.

One of the problem is, sometimes, for example, after collecting the data, all or some of TriggerVolt values should be added/substracted by an offset value. You may say it is better to clear the ListView, do the changes in the object using a foreach or whatever, then recrate the ListView. But isn’t there a way to directly point out to a specific row-column? Forexample I would really like something that I can name a cell and call it later. someting like:
Cell[J6][PreTriggerVolt] == 0.01212 (just a general idea)

Another problem is sorting the data by name, greatness or … For example if I sort the Pin column, the row below actual pin name can be dominant. I mean the Force : -0.1 for example…then everything in my listview collapse!!! it will be a huge mess.

And a lot of other problems you may already know about ListView.

I want to know what is the best way to approach this goal.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Instead of building the listview you should look into binding the control directly to your model. Here is a good tutorial on Binding in WinForms. Depending on what you want to do with the data being shown a DataGrid may be a better option (especially if you want the user to be able to edit the data, even with custom controls – see this tutorial).

After you have set the binding up you will need to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface on your model class to notify the binding framework that a property has changed.

public class TestData:  INotifyPropertyChanged
{
private string _name;
public string Name
{
    get { return _name; }
    set
    {
        _name = value;
        this.NotifyPropertyChanged("Name");
    }
}

// I only included one property for simplicity.  You of course will need to do this
// for every property in the test model

public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

private void NotifyPropertyChanged(string name)
{
    if (PropertyChanged != null)
    {
        PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name));
    }
}

}