Design-Time Experience

Any component library worth its salt will ship with designers to help you be more productive at design-time. As you've probably guessed by now, the XtraGrid Suite is no different in this regard - but what makes the XtraGrid stand head and shoulders above its competition are the lengths to which we have gone to streamline the design-time experience and ensure that you are more productive, each and every day. When engineering the XtraGrid Suite, we followed a simple principle - avoid modal dialogs whenever possible so that you can work directly on the form as much as possible. Once you start using the XtraGrid, you'll discover that we delivered upon this objective by never forcing you to invoke designers or access nested properties within the Property window - simply click on what you see on the form to customize it. In addition to our unique on-form object access technology, we ship a Feature Browser that, as you will soon discover, will radically reduce the amount of time you spend customizing the grid to meet your specific business requirements.

On-Form Object Access and Layout Customization

As mentioned a moment ago, using the XtraGrid at design-time means you will be more productive because you can circumvent cumbersome designer dialog and get to the task at hand - designing your application rather than struggling to customize an individual component. So how easy does On-Form Object Access make things? Well, you simply click on the object you need to customize and you'll instantly see its settings in the Properties window. This is available for columns, bands, card fields and Views - all objects you see on screen.

To make such customization possible, all appropriate objects are derived from the Component class, which in turn, provides another nice benefit since you can access columns, bands and Views in code using their names...No need to use any methods, indexers, etc.

View Customization

You don't have to browse the Properties window searching for properties that specify the layout of a band or columns, their sort order and grouping positions. You can customize the view's layout directly within the designer just like your end-users. Click column headers to apply sorting, use drag and drop operations to reorder, hide or move them to the group panel as needed.

You can also reorder and hide columns, apply sorting and grouping right on the form.

See column header drag and drop in action.

You can even use the XtraGrid's built-in column header menu to customize the view's layout.

Master-Detail Hierarchy Customization

In addition to View layout customization, the grid's master-detail hierarchy can be customized directly on the form. This includes building the master-detail tree and providing Views for each corresponding level.

The Level Designer is enabled by default. You can change it's visiblity using the grid's context menu.

You can easily add nested levels, delete existing ones and change level names (which are child relation names) using the context menu shown below.

Associating grid levels with Views is also just a matter of a single click. The View chooser context menu allows you to create a new View, use a View stored within the repository or convert an existing View to another type of View while preserving the maximum number of settings.

The Feature Browser

The XtraGrid was the first grid control ever released for the .NET Framework, and since its original release, has provided the largest feature set of any competing product. As you can imagine though, having lots of properties and events means that you will have to deal with a learning curve. To address this issue, we've made sure to architect a crystal-clear API - each View only holds its native settings and those settings which target similar capabilities are logically grouped. We've made certain to fully document all classes with a well-structured help file, with tons of practical examples to get you up and running in the shortest possible time. Even with this attention to detail, we continued to work towards streamlining the design-time experience and the results of our efforts is our new Feature Browser.

The XtraGrid Feature Browser is a superior alternative to the standard Properties window for numerous reasons, including:

• A well-structured tree view allows easy access to XtraGrid's functionality. We don't simply give you a different visual structure than the standard Property window - We allow you to access the same settings at different tree nodes. For instance, you can access the grid view's footer settings either via the Visual Elements or via the Total Summary node. This design guarantees that you dont have to think about feature customization in the same way we do. You can reach your destination point using different paths.
• When you choose a node within the feature tree view, you have access to three things: First, brief information about related settings containing links to the appropriate properties and methods. When you click a link, the property window automatically focuses the corresponding member - so you don't have to search throught it. Second, Properties are intelligently filtered. When you choose a tree view node, the Properties window displays only the settings related to the feature you've selected. And Third, a tabbed preview - one tab containing a sample grid with meaningful data and the other represents your newly customized grid populated with dummy data.
• The Feature Browser is object-independent and when you select a feature to customize, you get related settings for all objects in one location. In other words, if you need to customize a grid's summary total, you'll see all settings needed to enable footer visibility (since summaries are displayed in the footer) and the column settings that specify actual summary calculations.

The Appearance Editor

With our Appearance Editor, you need only click on a View within the Level Designer to expand the View's Apperance property to access style settings for all View elements. Once you begin using the XtraGrid Suite, you will find that it's really quite easy, but to simplify it even further, you will discover that you never need to search for the appropriate property to customize (no more having to guess the name of a property!). You simply click the element that requires customization and access its properties.