Question

Is there a way to add a control (e.g. a button) to a Winforms DataGridView cell in C#?

(What I’m aiming at is putting various kinds of controls in different cells of the grid…)

Answer 1

you can do like this….

There’re two ways to do this:

• 1). Cast a DataGridViewCell to a certain cell type that exists. For
  example, convert a DataGridViewTextBoxCell to
  DataGridViewComboBoxCell type.
• 2). Create a control and add it into the controls collection of
  DataGridView, set its location and size to fit the cell that to be
  host.

See my sample code below which illustrates the tricks.

Code Snippet

    private void Form5_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        DataTable dt = new DataTable();
        dt.Columns.Add("name");
        for (int j = 0; j < 10; j++)
        {
            dt.Rows.Add("");
        }
        this.dataGridView1.DataSource = dt;
        this.dataGridView1.Columns[0].Width = 200;

        /*
         * First method : Convert to an existed cell type such ComboBox cell,etc
         */

        DataGridViewComboBoxCell ComboBoxCell = new DataGridViewComboBoxCell();
        ComboBoxCell.Items.AddRange(new string[] { "aaa","bbb","ccc" });
        this.dataGridView1[0, 0] = ComboBoxCell;
        this.dataGridView1[0, 0].Value = "bbb";

        DataGridViewTextBoxCell TextBoxCell = new DataGridViewTextBoxCell();
        this.dataGridView1[0, 1] = TextBoxCell;
        this.dataGridView1[0, 1].Value = "some text";

        DataGridViewCheckBoxCell CheckBoxCell = new DataGridViewCheckBoxCell();
        CheckBoxCell.Style.Alignment = DataGridViewContentAlignment.MiddleCenter;
        this.dataGridView1[0, 2] = CheckBoxCell;
        this.dataGridView1[0, 2].Value = true;

        /*
         * Second method : Add control to the host in the cell
         */
        DateTimePicker dtp = new DateTimePicker();
        dtp.Value = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10);
        //add DateTimePicker into the control collection of the DataGridView
        this.dataGridView1.Controls.Add(dtp);
        //set its location and size to fit the cell
        dtp.Location = this.dataGridView1.GetCellDisplayRectangle(0, 3,true).Location;
        dtp.Size = this.dataGridView1.GetCellDisplayRectangle(0, 3,true).Size;
    }