I'm looking in silverlight for a control that support grouping and the possibility to customize the group header with a template (like a grid with text and images)
I tried the DataGrid, but I can set only a String as the group header (or if I'm wrong how can I display a string and two images?)
Thank you
Francesco
BTW: I'm using MVVM and bindings.
EDIT: I'm looking primarily to something standard (microsoft) or free component. Or we (the company for which I work) already use ComponentOne.
You didn't specify free or not but if you are looking for off the shelf products Telerik offers a number of Silverlight controls. Their RadGrid allows for custom datatemplating as well as your other requirements of grouping and image usage.
Another good one that I have used on testing but never in production is jibGrid on Codeplex. You may want to check that one out as well jibgird on CodePlex It does support grouping but I can't recall usage of images in the header.
If you are looking for using the default datagrid you can customize the header and column headers using datatemplates See this msdn link for more information As far as grouping, sorting and filtering this is not offered out of the box as with the aforementioned controls. To do this you will need to write a little code own your own. This msdn article provides some steps on how to accomplish this.
Hope this helps
I decided to use the FlexGrid of ComponentOne.
In this way I used the grouping mode to group (together with the disclosure function), and the merging function to merge the first column of each group.
Related
We need to get rid of DevExpress Bootstrap Controls for ASP.NET Core from project.
What would be the easiest/cheapest/feastet solution?
To simply rewrite everything with a different framework like Angular/Vue/React?
Maybe there is a known framework/method of migrating to DevExpress ASP.NET Core Controls? Or to something else?
How many controls were used from DevExpress?
If you only used a few controls, then you only need a few replacements.
I would not call purchase of some controls from DevExpress a whole "framework", but that of only purchasing some controls to use with your project.
So, does the project use 3-5 or 50 of those DevExpress controls? (by using, I mean DIFFERENT kinds of controls).
If you only used a few, say like their GridView, then you would only need to find a replacement for their gridview control, or simply use the built-in one, and fancy it up with some css, and addtional options. (I would make a user control).
So, you want to determine what the controls used did, how many different controls were used, and then find some controls that have a great look and feel that you like.
Their grid controls are VERY nice, since they have some "really" nice filter options for the header of that grid control.
So, you need to find some control replacements, but how many did the project use will quite much determine scope here.
So, in place of say their tab control, then consider using the jQuery one. As noted, I would wrap say the jQuery.UI tab control into a user control, so then you can just drag + drop in that jQuery.UI "tab" control in place of the devExpress one.
Same goes for the multi-select combo box (dropdown list).
So, either you cobbile together some replacements of your own, or you find some replacemetns, or you buy some more controls from another vendor.
The challenge and issue will of course be that each of their controls has a specific object and event model.
However, that's not really any different then say if you started used sweet-alert, and now want to replace sweet-alert say with some jQuery.UI dialogs.
I would say that the real challenge of replacing their controls is often not so much finding a replacement, but finding something that has a great look and feel. The main huge wonderful bonus of the devExpress controls tends to be their look and feel. In other words, they had someone with REALLY good taste in terms of look and feel.
I mean, for years I used the ajaxtoolkit. (free, open source). it was and still remains a fantastic set of controls. The pop dialog, the tab control, the multi-select combo box, the HTML editor?
They are all great, but their HUGE downside is not the features, but the controls from that free toolkit look like something from the 1980's!!!
The popular jQuery.UI? Same thing, the controls look ugly and something designed by a un-employed rodeo clown living in a trailer park.
There is a HUGE but BEYOND huge reason that bootstap is so popular.
Know the answer?
Why of course bootstrap is popular for ONE big HUGE massive SIMPLE reason:
Bootstrap has a fantastic look + feel. (zero other reasons for bootstrap being popular!!).
If you ever hired a graphic artist to re-work the look and feel of your web site? Guess what? Their resulting work and suggestions will look like the default of bootstrap!!!
So, someone in the print and graphic design industry or someone with VERY good talent and great taste created the bootstrap system. So, when you use bootstrap, then you get fantastic looking results, results that normally would take a full time graphic artist on your staff.
Regardless, we are wondering off topic here.
The main issue you have to determine is how many controls were used from devExpress. Most of their controls do follow a similar object model as the base controls found in asp.net webform controls.
So, for example, jQuery.UI controls has a great set of features (a great set of UI components), but they look way too dated and old fashioned.
The issue you have is not that you want to replace some of the devExpress controls you used, but how much work it would be to replace say a dev-express "gridview" with another different grid control. Every single one of those controls used will not only require you to spend HUGE amounts of time finding a replacement, but I think the LARGER issue is finding something that don't look like it was created by someone living in mom's basement, or by that drunken un-employed rodeo clown that does not belong in our industry.
your issue is not finding some replacement controls, your issue is how much code and money (time and resources) you have available to replace those controls.
You can no more change a bunch of code in c# to then using say client side JavaScript can then you take some Pascal code, and covert that code to vb.net code.
There no more a replacement for those controls from dev-express then there is deciding tomorrow to re-write some server side code in vb.net to now being client side JavaScript code.
In fact, what I am quite much telling you?
How the computer and IT industry has worked for 50+ years has NOT change one bit, and it not change one bit if you decide to rip out some existing controls and replace them with different controls.
Its possible you are asking for something you never seen, never heard of, and thus are imagining some magic wand here, but those don't exist in our industry either, do they?
As I noted, for quite some time, I used the AjaxToolKit. Turns out that jQuery.UI has near EVERY the same kind of controls available. But, the massive difference is jQuery.UI controls are client side ones, but worse yet, they don't work the same as the AjaxToolKit ones. In other words, there is a nice "tab" control in AjaxToolkit, and there is a nice tab control in jQuery.UI. So, they both are tab control, but THEY are VAST different in their operations, how you use them, how they work.
However, both the jQuery.UI and the AjaxToolkit tab control?
My gosh, do they look like crap.
At least the jQuery.UI one can be easy bootstrapped styled.
Again, note how we not really now back to a JUST having a control replacement, but one that looks VERY nice and VERY tasteful out of the box, and a control that should take zero efforts on your part to obtain that great look and feel.
Want to know what product has those great looking controls and great look and feel out of the box?
the DevExpress ones!!!
I have some custom controls that I would like to make more 'user friendly' in Cider (VS wpf designer). I have red all the documentation in MSDN and some sites that I found through google , but I did not find answers to some simple questions :
How to set default values for the items that are created from a collection editor (like columns in datagrid, not drag-drop from toolbox)
How to generate XAML (like the datagrid dose when you click generate columns)
Please let me know if you know of any doc that goes into details such as those mentioned above.
Also if you know/have any custom controls with visible source code that have designer support (like Xceed or DevExpress) please share a link.
Recommended books:
1- www.amazon.com/Pro-WPF-2012-Presentation-Professionals
2- any book about Design Pattern like www.amazon.com/3-0-Design-Patterns-Judith-Bishop
3- MVVM
to add a column to data grid you don't need to generate xaml, there is a column collection you can add one by code behind
dataGrid1.Columns.Add(new DataGridTextColumn{ Header = "column1"});
read the first book well and you will be good
This an excellent and rare book that goes deep into custom controls development:
WPF Control Development Unleashed: Building Advanced User Experiences
My company is going to development drag and drop feature in Silverlight. We are very new to Silverlight and just learnt SL for a week ago. But I believe the feature that my company wants can be done in Silverlight. The control about is about the time table in which the resource will be shifted around.
Here is the feature detail. We have one list box on left (resource list) and one table on the right. What we want to do is drag an item from the list onto the table then may have some data manipulation on table. I think it’s simple and but for me I don’t know how to create the table which is I think there is no built in control like this. Please take a look my screenshot below.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/QCaVX.jpg
My questions are:
How can we approach to achieve this
feature?
What is the best way to implement
this control?
How we can handle the event such as
drop, reload, bind and so on?
How can we select and drag cell on
table?
Yes, Silverlight can do that. It has drag-drop and rich support for creating custom user controls.
The Telerik RadControls for Silverlight have a control that does some of what you need. They also make source available.
You might want to research all the available third party controls first to save development cost.
There are too many questions in your question to answer. Best do your research and then ask specific questions.
The Telerik control is called RadScheduleView and can be seen here: http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#ScheduleView/FirstLook. It has nice performance and a lot of features.
We are also using Telerik RadScheduleView .It is simple and lot of demos for you to start.
I'm making pretty heavy use of the Panorama and Pivot controls in my WP7 applications. Is it possible to use these same controls in a standard Silverlight (4) application?
http://phone.codeplex.com/
I added the dll's, was able to compile and create the controls in my views. However; I was not able to "Scroll". I thought they used the "LeftMouseDown" event handlers but I guess I'm wrong.
You would need to do additional work to get them to work on the desktop: manipulation events are used in phone controls since they have much more information available such as the maniupation delta.
Being an open source project I am sure they could look into adding that support, would be good to open such a work item on that site perhaps. (There are no official Pivot and Panorama controls yet from Microsoft)
I created a panorama-like control for SL4 in the following blog post:
http://www.scottlogic.co.uk/blog/colin/2010/10/silverlight-as-an-alternative-to-powerpoint/
It might be a good starting point for making a more fully features control
I have seen a lot of discussions going on and people asking about DataGrid for WPF and complaining about Microsoft for not having one with their WPF framework till date. We know that WPF is a great UI technology and have the Concept of ItemsControl,DataTemplate, etc,etc to make great UX. Even WPF has got a more closely matching control- ListView, which can be easily templated to give better UX than a traditional Datagrid like display. And I would say a readymade DataGrid control will kill or hide a lot of creativity and it surely will decrease the innovations in User Experience field.
So what is your opinion about the need of DataGrid in WPF as a Framework component? If you feel it is necessary then is it just because the world is so used to the DatGrid way of data display for many years?
Some other threads having the discussion about DatGrid are here and here
Link to WPF ToolKit - Latest WPF DatGrid
DataGrids are excellent for displaying large amounts of tabular data bound to a backing store.
But what happened in the WinForms world was that people often used them for everything that required a multi-element scrolling list. Souped-up third-party DataGrids soon became available that allowed columns and fields to contain buttons and ComboBoxes and icons, etc.
The DataGrid became a workhorse because there was a need for something it could be coaxed into behaving like. Similar happened to DataTables before generic collections came along--and when you're using lots of DataTables, presenting it in the UI with a DataGrid is the path of least resistance.
I think that when WPF came out, a lot of programmers like me were still thinking in this fashion, and sought out WPF ports of the DataGrid concept.
Can't think of a better control to display tabular data, especially in business apps where you don't want to reinvent the wheel by templating/developing a (Headered)ItemsControl to make it behave like the good old DGV. I'm sure you saw this.
Nobody is disputing that you can make a DataGrid control in WPF yourself. The same can probably be said about WinForms, although it would be more difficult. I've implemented some functionality with ListView - presenting tabular data is easy, you could even say it's well supported. However, the amount of code, manually written code, needed to make an editing ListView is enormous.
The business applications usually require editing of many tables, and you don't want to be creative, you want to be quick. That's why DataGrid is needed in my opinion.
Yes DataGrids will never go away as essential business UI components. People love their spreadsheets and we want to share in that love!
Note that MS are shipping these extra controls - they have created the WPF Toolkit on CodePlex to provide a fast-turnaround, open-source style of deployment.
It already includes a DataGrid and Calendar.
Yes it is!
Among many other controls that ms failed to deliver. (Datepicker, NumericControl)
MS should first give us the tools to get the job done, that is the least i expect from a programming enviroment with the hype of wpf.
It is essential, but you can achieve nearly the same effect with a ListView that is using a GridView, can't you?
After working with WPF for about 2 years now. I would say that a DataGrid is really just a glorified ListBox (since [almost] everything in WPF is styleless).
One could style a ListBox to take an Entity of some sort and show a "record" control for each entry. Depending on how flexible these are made, they could automatically adjust based on the entity passed.