Question

I need to populate a list that has 3 columns.

First: Icon Image.
Second: A string.
Third: A string.

I started to wire up a DataGridView and it seem awfully large and powerful for my needs. I am not interested in displaying data in a grid similar to a spreadsheet and I do not require all the functionality that comes with this control. Is there a better alternative?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could go for the ListView in View.Details view, as this is similar to the view that you see in Windows Explorer when in Details view.

Create a form and place on it an ImageList and a ListView named imageList1 and listView1 respectively. Then place the following code into the forms load method:

listView1.Columns.Add("Image");
listView1.Columns.Add("Text1");
listView1.Columns.Add("Text2");

listView1.SmallImageList = imageList1;

var icon = Icon.ExtractAssociatedIcon(@"c:\windows\explorer.exe");
imageList1.Images.Add(icon);
var item = new ListViewItem();
item.ImageIndex = 0;

var subItem1 = new ListViewItem.ListViewSubItem();
subItem1.Text = "Text 1";
var subItem2 = new ListViewItem.ListViewSubItem();
subItem2.Text = "Text 2";

item.SubItems.Add(subItem1);
item.SubItems.Add(subItem2);

listView1.Items.Add(item);

The code really couldn’t hurt for some tidying up, but it calls out quite explicitly what it’s doing and should hopefully make it quite clear how to use a ListView for this purpose.