Question

Is it possible in WPF to bind a ListView (NOT a DataGrid) to a Matrix (Cross-Tab) DataSet in which the columns are unknown beforehand?

Using the Northwind database as an example: the simple query below will return a wellknown dataset which can easily be bound to a listview:

SELECT  Year(o.OrderDate) AS [Year], Month(o.OrderDate) AS [Month], 
COUNT(o.OrderID) AS [NumOrders]
FROM Orders o 
GROUP BY Year(o.OrderDate), Month(o.OrderDate)
ORDER BY 1, 2

To generate a more meaningful report, we might run the result set from the above query (in a reporting program) to generate some thing as below shown below:

SELECT  [Year], 
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 1 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Jan',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 2 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Feb',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 3 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Mar',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 4 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Apr',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 5 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'May',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 6 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Jun',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 7 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Jul',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 8 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Aug',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 9 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Sep',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 10 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Oct',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 11 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Nov',
SUM(CASE [Month] WHEN 12 Then NumOrders ELSE 0 END) AS 'Dec'
FROM
( 
SELECT  Year(o.OrderDate) AS [Year], Month(o.OrderDate) AS [Month], 
COUNT(o.OrderID) AS [NumOrders]
FROM Orders o 
GROUP BY Year(o.OrderDate), Month(o.OrderDate)
)t0
GROUP BY [Year]

Which results into something like this:

My question is, It it possible to bind this final result to a ListView or a Flowdocument in WPF without having prior knowledge of the resulting columns?

Answer 1

You can add columns dynamically to a ListView by using Attached Properties. Check out this article on the CodeProject it explains exactly that…

WPF DynamicListView – Binding to a DataMatrix