WPF New Features - 2009 Volume 1

The xamDataGrid™ has topped the list for deep feature enhancement in the NetAdvantage® WPF controls 2009 Volume 1 release. Add these new features to our comprehensive set of WPF controls for building your Line of Business applications, and you will have empowered your Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 toolbox to produce some very electrifying user experiences.

 

Supercharging the Grid View - NEW!

All features below supplement both our WPF data grid control, xamDataGrid, as well as the GridView presentation format of the xamDataPresenter™ control. We are bringing more power to the WPF data grid for your data-driven application needs.

Record Filtering

The WPF data grid control provides your users with three mechanisms through which filter functionality can be exposed, and these are highly-configurable based on the needs of your Line of Business application. They include:

  • Fixed Filter Mode allows you to place an empty record at the top (or bottom) of the data grid view so that the user can enter values that will be used to show only those records with matching conditions.

    Empty filter record in the xamDataGrid.
  • Dropdown List appears from the filter icon that you can show in the field header. From this dropdown list your users can choose from a list of operators that they want applied when filtering records. This user interface allows your application to make its users as productive as they would be when applying filters in a spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel™.

    Filtering dropdown in the xamDataGrid.

  • Fully-Featured Form is for when you want to give your users the absolute greatest control over the filter conditions. It presents an elaborate user interface allowing your users to easily design the most complex record filters, comprised of a limitless number of Boolean AND/OR/NOT operators that they can nest to arbitrary depth.

    Custom filtering dialog in the xamDataGrid.

In addition to these canned mechanisms, there is programmatic record filtering support which you can take advantage of to use your own external UI or dialog from which to control the record filtering taking place within the WPF grid view.

The filter conditions are readily extensible by adding your own implementation of the ICondition interface to the Conditions collection used by the record filter. In this way, you can allow users to invoke complex filter conditions that may, for instance, invoke a Web service that performs conditional processing against remote data.

Fixed Fields

Fixed fields allow the user to scroll a grid view having many fields, while at the same time keeping key fields stationary for convenient reference. There are two ways in which users can manipulate the fixing of fields to either the near or far edge of the WPF data grid:

  • Users can drag a field header to either the left or right (top or bottom) side of the WPF data grid to fix it in place.
  • Alternately, users can click on a "pushpin" indicator that appears in the field header, and that can be configured to fix that field to either the left or right (top or bottom) side of the WPF data grid.

Near/far field fixing in the xamDataGrid.

Fixed fields work in both horizontal and vertical orientations of the grid view (i.e., in a vertical grid, your users may fix fields on the top or bottom edge). It is the near/far concept of field fixing that allows for this orientation-independence, and also support for languages in which the natural reading direction of text flows from right-to-left. The near edge is always the edge closest to where the text of a line or a record would begin (based on the language's direction), whereas the far edge is always the edge closest to where the text of a line or a record would end.

Header Placement

If your users have ever had to scroll vertically through a hierarchical WPF data grid with lots of child records, then they quite possibly know the frustration of having the field header at the top of group of records scroll out of sight. Using the new header placement functionality, you can have the field headers made to repeat themselves for easier reference. Field headers can be made to repeat at each hierarchical level of the grid, or at every group-by record.

No repeat headers in the xamDataGrid.

SyncWithCurrentItem Support

You can control whether the WPF data grid is synchronizing itself with its current items' selected state from the data or items source it is bound against, and vice versa, with one property setting. This enables you to easily set-up two-way selection synchronization between the WPF data grid and your underlying data when that data can support it.

Robust CollectionView Support

You will be able to present data confidently when you sort or filter the underlying data source, because the WPF data grid fully adheres to the CollectionView API established by Microsoft.