Appearance Customization

There are many things you can do when developing applications that will affect how professional your products appear to be to your customers. Among these the most important will probably be a consistent and elegant user interface. Omitting a single appearance aspect from a few of your UI elements might make your end-users think that the quality of your application is mediocre at best. With the ExpressQuantumGrid, this can't happen since it gives you complete and total control over all the appearance aspects of all its visual elements.

Styles and Color Management

To help you apply a standard Look & Feel across your entire application and give your end-users a simple way in which to modify your UI's appearance, the ExpressQuantumGrid, ExpressQuantumTreeList, ExpressScheduler, ExpressPivotGrid, and ExpressVerticalGrid Suites implement our fully reusable Styles technology. With the Styles technology, all these products produce totally configurable and state-of-the-art UIs giving you complete control over data presentation in an elegant manner.

Style objects define the appearance of visual elements which make up the control (headers, group panel, detail rows, footer, etc). Each element has a series of Style properties that can be set to control element color, the choice of font, background color, and background bitmap. Once created, each Style object is stored within the Style Repository and can be applied to any control in a form which supports the Styles technology.

Look & Feel Options

The ExpressQuantumGrid and other Developer Express controls fully support our Look & Feel technology which gives you the ability to apply one of the predefined visual styles including Standard, Flat, UltraFlat (Office XP), Office2003, and the Windows XP (native) themes.

Each control within the ExpressQuantumGrid Suite has a LookAndFeel property which in addition to Styles, controls external display elements, such as the scrollbar style and a 3D emphasis on separation lines and buttons. Like Styles, a common LookAndFeel controller allows you to maintain the same look and feel settings across all the components on your forms.

Conditional Formatting

Visually differentiating specific records or cells is a common technique utilized in numerous applications to improve the experience of end-users and make the information more readable. With the ExpressQuantumGrid, you can control conditional cell and row formatting (both style and content) in a straightforward and highly flexible manner.

Custom Painting

The ExpressQuantumGrid allows you to manually paint all its individual elements. With custom painting, the grid can be turned into anything - even a MineSweeper game. And the ExpressQuantumGrid ships with a demo application which shows how this can be done.