Question

I have the a class in my application. It has been bound to winform textbox controls. But the textbox which is bound to BookingNo property, always shows zero (0). But i want the textbox keep empty. Is there any way to do it? Here is my code snippet.

    public class Booking 
    {
    private int pBookingNo;
    private string pCustomerName;
    private string pAddress;

    public int BookingNo
    {
        get { return pBookingNo; }
        set
        {
            if (!value.Equals(pBookingNo))
            {
                pBookingNo = value;
            }
        }
    }

    public string CustomerName
    {
        get { return pCustomerName; }
        set
        {
            if (!value.Equals(pCustomerName))
            {
                pCustomerName = value;

            }
        }
    }

    public Booking() { }
}


    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
    public Form1()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
    }

    private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        AddDataBindings();
    }

    private void AddDataBindings()
    {
        bsBooking.DataSource = typeof(Booking);

        txtBookingNo.DataBindings.Add("Text", bsBooking, "BookingNo", true, DataSourceUpdateMode.OnPropertyChanged, null, "G", GlobalVariables.CurrentCultureInfo);
        txtCustomerName.DataBindings.Add("Text", bsBooking, "CustomerName");

    }
}

Answer 1

You could use custom formatting for the binding by adding a handler to the Format event (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.binding.format.aspx) and return an empty string when the value is zero. But you wouldn’t be able to tell whether the value is actually zero or it just hasn’t been set already, in which case using the int? approach suggested by @Grumbler85 is better.