Design-Time Experience
To be productive at design time, you need to have a rich design-time interface that provides complete control over the visual presentation of your application and in turn, significantly reduce learning curves. For simple controls such as the grid that is shipped with Delphi/C++ Builder, the traditional Object Inspector and Form designer are fully adequate. For more advanced controls such as the ExpressQuantumGrid, you need more... The ExpressQuantumGrid Suite provides you with a number of unique tools to improve your design-time experience and accelerate your productivity. They include: In version 6, we've extended design-time interfaces and provided you with additional design-time capabilities. To learn more about new design-time features, refer to the corresponding section of the What's New in v6 white paper.
On-Form Object Access
After having implemented On-Form Object Access in the ExpressQuantumGrid we are confident in saying that it will dramatically increase your productivity. With this option, you can click a grid element and instantly see its settings within the Object Inspector window. This is available for columns, bands, card rows, and chart elements - all the objects you see on screen. 
The same is true for grid levels and Views. To access a grid level, all that you need to do is to click the corresponding tab within the grid control.
With version 6, each View displays a triangular selector in its top-left corner. By clicking it, you can access a View directly.
Structure Navigator
The ExpressQuantumGrid includes a design-time only controller called the Structure Navigator, which is drawn directly upon the surface of the control. This element allows you to easily build a master-detail tree of the Grid and access its grid levels and Views directly in the Form designer.
In version 6, the Structure Navigator highlights the currently active object and also allows you to select multiple objects by clicking View or Level labels while holding the Shift key.
With a grid level's context menu, you can add nested levels, delete existing levels and rearrange them within the same nesting level in a straightforward manner.
Creating a new View or selecting one of the existing Views and associating it with a grid level also requires just a single click.
With the ExpressQuantumGrid v6, you can copy settings (options and styles) from one of the existing Views and apply them to the active View.
In version 6, the currently active View's context menu is integrated into the Grid's context menu. This happens only if the active view does not have detail records. 
Component Editor
The Component Editor improves the manner in which you can modify grid element properties - including grid levels, Views and grid items. The Component Editor represents the grid's structure in a regular form which combines the Structure Navigator's functionality with the ability to access and manage grid view elements and, to specify summaries for tabular Views. You can open the Component Editor window either by clicking the Customize button in the Structure Navigator or selecting the Editor option from the grid's context menu or by double-clicking the grid control. All panels of the Component Editor are briefly described below.
The Structure panel is similar to the Structure Navigator and displays a tree-like structure of the Grid. You can click each label with the left mouse button to display the properties of the corresponding object in the Object Inspector. The context menus for the grid, level and view labels are the same as in the Structure Navigator.
The Views panel allows you to access and manage all the Views created within the grid control. Additionally, you can also open the Layout and Data Editor to customize View layout options and enter its data (available only for unbound Views).
When a View is selected either in the Structure panel or in the Views panel, its items (bands, columns, card rows, series, and data groups) are listed in the corresponding pages. The options within each panel allow you to:
- Manage the View's grid items by adding new and deleting existing items;
- Specify the order in which these items will be displayed within the View;
- Automatically create all grid items based upon the contents of the data source connected to the View by clicking the Retrieve Fields button (available for tabular and Card Views only);
- Automatically add missing grid items based upon the contents of the data source connected to the View by clicking the Retrieve Missing Fields button (available starting from the ExpressQuantumGrid v6 for tabular and Card Views only);
- Restore the width, caption, and other properties of grid items to their default values (available for tabular and Card Views only);
The Summary panel allows you to specify various kinds of summaries for the selected tabular View: footer, group summaries and summary groups. For your convenience, the Summary panel has an individual page for each summary kind.
Layout and Data Editor
The Layout and Data Editor represents an interactive preview window where you can easily customize the View's layout as your needs dictate by arranging its bands, columns and card rows, grouping and sorting data, showing or hiding specific view elements using the context menu and instantly see the resulting View. The Layout and Data Editor window also provides a convenient way to enter data for unbound Views at design time.
The Layout and Data Editor window can be opened by clicking the corresponding item in the View's context menu. Alternatively, you can click the Edit View Layout and Data button in the Views panel of the Component Editor.
You are free either to apply or discard the changes you made to the original View's layout. In addition, by checking the corresponding options, you can choose which customization aspects (both layout and data) of the View should be saved upon closing the Layout and Data Editor window.
Freehand Layout Customization
In addition to the Structure Navigator and Component Editor, the ExpressQuantumGrid allows you to fully configure its visual display at design time - from data grouping to grid item arrangement via drag and drop operations. 
Grid Binding
The tedious task of connecting agrid to a data source and creating its grid items from scratch is made much easier with the ExpressQuantumGrid. All you have to do is to choose the appropriate data source from either the Grid's or the View's context menu. Linking the grid to a data source in this manner automatically creates grid items (columns for tabular Views and rows for Card Views) for all the fields in the data source. 
Context-Driven Properties
The ExpressQuantumGrid extends the Object Inspector to enable the use of Object Behaviors, so that you can select the behavior class that you wish the object under development to have, and the new properties for that behavior are automatically cascaded into the Object Inspector. For instance, you can select the type of in-place editor for a grid item and see the properties for this type in the Object Inspector. This allows you to take full advantage of our extremely powerful Edit Repository and Style Repository technologies and ensures that you have all the necessary development options at your fingertips.
Simultaneous Style Customization
With our Styles technology, you have unrivaled capabilities to customize the appearance aspects of grid elements in a straightforward manner. You can create, modify, and apply styles in the Object Inspector and instantly see the grid's resulting appearance.
Using style sheets adds outstanding flexibility to your development process since you can manage the appearance aspects of an entire View with a single property. With several predefined style sheet sets and the ability to modify, save, and restore style sheets, you can reuse your style settings for all the grids across your application(s).
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