Question

So I am just joining the WPF club after dabbling in Winforms for a couple of years. I am definiately enjoing the databinding in WPF, but I am having trouble with the DataGrid.

I have a highly-customized data structure that stores results from a SQL query, which I would like to continue to use in WPF. I have seen examples of binding to lists of objects, but not for anything dynamic like a SQL query.

Is there some interface that I can make my data structure implement so the DataGrid can get the necessary information such as the row & column count, headers, and the data?

Answer 1

My goal was to bind to my custom structure similar to a DataTable, allowing the DataGrid to “discover” information about my structure.

The short answer is to implement the following interfaces:

IList
IEnumerable
ITypedList

As well as inheriting from CustomTypeDescriptor (or implementing ICustomTypeDescriptor)

This Question helped a lot in dealing with the CustomTypeDescriptor stuff which was the most challenging.

My enumeration object was simple an object that stored a reference back to the main table so it could ask what the value was at a specific row and column.

public AgilityTableRow(AgilityTableBase table, int rowIndex)
    {
        _table = table;
        _rowIndex = rowIndex;
    }

    public object this[int columnIndex]
    {
        get 
        {
            return _table[columnIndex, _rowIndex]; 
        }
    }

    public object this[string columnName]
    {

        get 
        {
            return _table[_table.GetFieldIndex(columnName), _rowIndex]; 
        }
    }

Note: this class needs to implement ICustomTypeDescriptor and can simply forward the call to the table to get the properties:

public PropertyDescriptorCollection GetProperties()
    {
        return _table.GetProperties();
    }