Automatically create an input UI from db fields in winforms? - winforms

Question

I'm trying to create a form in winforms to add records to a db, a new customer for example. I'm working with entity framework.
What I did until today is to create a new empty "Customer" object from the class that the entity framework generated. Then I added this empty object to a list and set the list as the datasource of a datagridview.
That way I automatically had in the grid all the required fields to input to the db.
Everything worked.
But now, the client wants a better design for the UI - something that looks like a contact form in web pages and not a grid row.
How can I make something like that automatically, like I had with the datagridview, creating all the input fields automatically according to the db structure without creating manually labels and textboxes?

Answer 1

Your best bet would be to keep the DataGridView but override the style so that it looks far from a grid and more like what your boss is expecting.
Some suggestions to achieve this:
Remove the lines between each row.
Remove the headers and grid borders.
Add lots of padding to each row and column so each entry is spaced
out. For more advanced stuff you may need to override the Paint
method of some of the controls of the grid.

Answer 2

I ended up iterating the grid and creating textboxes and labels in each iteration.
void Generate_TextBoxes()
{
// top of textboxes
int current_top=150;
int current_left = 1000;
// index used to match between each textbox and the properate column in grid
int my_index = -1;
// iterate the grid and create textbox for each column
foreach (DataGridViewColumn col in dataGridView_add_customer.Columns)
{
my_index++;
// generate textboxes only for visible columns
if (col.Visible == true)
{
// increase the top each time for space between textboxes
current_top += 40;
// create a second column of textboxes (not all of them in 1 long column)
if (my_index == 6) { current_top = 190; current_left = 450; }
TextBox t = new TextBox();
t.Top = current_top;
t.Left = current_left;
t.Width = 170;
t.TextChanged +=new EventHandler(t_TextChanged);
// give an 'id' for each textbox with the corresponding index of the grid
t.Name = my_index.ToString();
Label l = new Label();
l.Text = col.HeaderCell.Value.ToString();
l.Top = current_top;
l.Left = current_left + 190;
this.Controls.Add(l);
this.Controls.Add(t);
}
and the function that binds the textbox to the grid:
void t_TextChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// create a reference in order to be able to access grid properties such as rows..
TextBox tt = (TextBox)sender;
// access the correct cell in the grid using the Name property you gave to the textbox (it was name=current_index..)
dataGridView_add_customer.Rows[0].Cells[int.Parse(tt.Name)].Value = tt.Text;
}