Question

Is it possible to sort all ListViewGroups of a Windows Forms ListView alphabetically at runtime?

Or do I have to manually implement sorting when I’m adding a group (using the “Insert” method of the ListViewGroupCollection)? If this is the case, can someone give me an idea how to do this?

Answer 1

In WinForms ListView, you have to do the sorting manually:

ListViewGroup[] groups = new ListViewGroup[this.listView1.Groups.Count];

this.listView1.Groups.CopyTo(groups, 0);

Array.Sort(groups, new GroupComparer());

this.listView1.BeginUpdate();
this.listView1.Groups.Clear();
this.listView1.Groups.AddRange(groups);
this.listView1.EndUpdate();

...

class GroupComparer : IComparer
{
    public int Compare(object objA, object objB)
    {
        return ((ListViewGroup)objA).Header.CompareTo(((ListViewGroup)objB).Header);
    }
}

Groups in .NET ListView are quite nasty – they look and behave like a mix between old Win32 ListView and Windows Explorer…

So I would recommend you Better ListView component which supports sorting groups out of the box:

this.betterListView1.Groups.Sort(new GroupComparer());

...

class GroupComparer : IComparer<BetterListViewGroup>
{
    public int Compare(BetterListViewGroup groupA, BetterListViewGroup groupB)
    {
        return groupA.Header.CompareTo(groupB.Header);
    }
}

Furthermore, the groups look and behave just like in Windows Explorer, are collapsible and no flickering happens even when you sort them.