Question

I have a List of complex objects containing other objects within that I give as the data source to a gridview.(currently I’m using BoundFields for the columns). I need to bind data to the columns from the objects within at run time. How can this be done?

Answer 1

Use a LINQ projection to flatten (denormalise) the entity graph. You can either create a new ViewModel type class, or alternatively bind to an anonymous class, something like this:

var viewList = (
   from entity in entityList
       select new
       {
           Field1 = entity.Field1,
           Field2 = entity.Relation.AnotherField,
           Field3 = entity.Field3 + entity.Relation.YetAnotherField
       }).ToList();
myGridView.DataSource = viewList;
myGridView.DataBind();

Use Field1, Field2 on the GridView properties for the data bindings.

Edit

The above projection, in Lambda syntax:

var viewList = entityList
    .Select(entity => new
       {
           Field1 = entity.Field1,
           Field2 = entity.Relation.AnotherField,
           Field3 = entity.Field3 + entity.Relation.YetAnotherField
       })
   .ToList();