Question

I want to create a table representing data I have, but I want each row to have a custom display. I have developed a little custom control that represents a row and has a few items in it (text box, check box, progress bar), however how do I now in the main form create multiple instances of this for the data I have?

e.g. is there a winforms control I can use to do this? or do I have to take a panel or something and programmatically do it?

I do need to somehow take responses back. So if someone clicks on the button in the 4th row say then I’ll need to be able to tell which row it was from.

As an aside would then be a way to BIND the above mentioned visualization of my data to the data itself, say housed in an Array?

thanks

Answer 1

I see two options here:

• You can use a DataRepeater. This control can be found in the Microsoft Visual Basic Powerpack. It allows you to place controls on a template which gets copied for each item in the databound collection.
• You can create a custom control and manually place one instance of it for each item in a collection, re-creating databinding for the controls in it. This requires you to either expose the controls inside publicly or as properties of the user control.

However, above options are mostly useful for non-tabular data. If your layout is strictly tabular (i. e. rectangular cells in a grid) then you can create a custom DataGridViewCell which takes some time to understand but not too much code. Putting a progress bar into such a cell shouldn’t prove too difficult.