Question

I have a DataGridView control and I want to populate it with data.

I use DataSource property

// dgvDealAsset is DataGridView
        private void DealAssetListControl_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            dgvDealAssets.AutoGenerateColumns = false;
            dgvDealAssets.DataSource = DealAssetList.Instance.Values.ToList();
}

Now problem number one. The class of my collection does not contain only simple types that I can map to columns using DataPropertyName. This is the class that is contained in collection.

class MyClass
{
  public String Name;
  MyOtherClass otherclass;
}

class MyOtherClass
{
 public String Name;
}

Now I am binding properties of MyClass to columns

col1.DataPropertyName = "Name"  // Ok 
col2.DataPropertyName = "otherclass" // Not OK - I will have empty cell

The problem is that I want to display otherclass.Name field. But if I try to write

col2.DataPropertyName = "otherclass.Name" 

I get empty cell.

I tried to manually set the column

private void DealAssetListControl_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    dgvDealAssets.AutoGenerateColumns = false;
    dgvDealAssets.DataSource = DealAssetList.Instance.Values.ToList();

// iterate through rows and set the column manually
        foreach (DataGridViewRow row in dgvDealAssets.Rows)
        {
            row.Cells["Column2"].Value = ((DealAsset)row.DataBoundItem).otherclass.Name;
        }

But this foreach cycle takes about minute to complete (2k elements). How to solve this problem?

Answer 1

DataGridView doesn’t support databinding to child properties. For more info, check this post

I like the solution that uses the CellFormatting event.