Question

I have a WinForms application with a DataGridView, which DataSource is a DataTable (filled from SQL Server) which has a column of xxx. The following code raises the exception of

ArgumentException was unhandled. Column named xxx cannot be found.

foreach (DataGridViewRow row in Rows)
{
    if (object.Equals(row.Cells["xxx"].Value, 123))
}

Is it possible to get the cell values by column name?

Answer 1

DataGridViewColumn objects have a Name (shown only in the forms designer) and a HeaderText (shown in the GUI at the top of the column) property. The indexer in your example uses the column’s Name property, so since you say that isn’t working I assume you’re really trying to use the column’s header.

There isn’t anything built in that does what you want, but it’s easy enough to add. I’d use an extension method to make it easy to use:

public static class DataGridHelper
{
    public static object GetCellValueFromColumnHeader(this DataGridViewCellCollection CellCollection, string HeaderText)
    {
        return CellCollection.Cast<DataGridViewCell>().First(c => c.OwningColumn.HeaderText == HeaderText).Value;            
    }
}

And then in your code:

foreach (DataGridViewRow row in Rows)
{
    if (object.Equals(row.Cells.GetCellValueFromColumnHeader("xxx"), 123))
    {
        // ...
    }
 }