Question

Lets say, we have 10 columns in one datagridview. I have 20 rows of data in these 10 columns.

Dynamically, I’m hiding (setting the .Visible property of the column to false) a few columns – say column 1, 2, 4, 5.

Now I want to copy the contents of the columns which are visible (20 rows of data, 6 visible columns – 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) to a new datagridview.

Any suggestions / advise / links?

I’ve researched this forum and could not find a post discussing about copying a subset of columns from one datagridview to another.

thanks.

Answer 1

Try this (you didn’t indicate whether it was ASP.NET, WinForms, etc – this example is based on WinForms). Christian’s suggestion above is in the right direction, but when I tried it out Clone() didn’t copy the values, and I couldn’t see a way to get it to do that.

// Set up a List<T> to hold the indexes of the visible columns
List<int> visibleColumns = new List<int>();

foreach (DataGridViewColumn col in dgv1.Columns)
{
    if (col.Visible)
    {
        dgv2.Columns.Add((DataGridViewColumn)col.Clone());

        visibleColumns.Add(col.Index);
    }
}

// Now add the data from the columns
// Set a counter for the current row index for the second DataGridView
int rowIndex = 0;

foreach (DataGridViewRow row in dgv1.Rows)
{

    // Add a new row to the DataGridView
    dgv2.Rows.Add();

    // Loop through the visible columns
    for (int i = 0; i < visibleColumns.Count; i++)
    {
        // Use the index of the for loop for the column in the target data grid
        // Use the index value from the List<T> for the cell of the source target data grid
        dgv2.Rows[rowIndex].Cells[i].Value = row.Cells[visibleColumns[i]].Value;
    }

    // Increment the rowIndex
    rowIndex++;
}

I’ll admit this is ugly and rather brute force, but I tested it and it worked. There may be better ways to do it, but this should at least help you some, I hope.