Creating a Silverlight, drag & drag enabled query builder - silverlight

what would be the best components to create a query builder? I imagine I'll need some sort of grid control. 30x30 cells perhaps. I would also love to have a snap-to-grid functionality as well. I'll be parsing the contents of the grid to create the queries so if I can iterate through the cells it would be a great help to. I'd be more than happy to post a sample project for anyone else to use if you all could help me with the base requirements. Thanks!

If you are already using the Telerik components for Silverlight, what about the RadExpressionEditor or RadDataFilter don't fit the requirements for what you're looking to do? Just curious as they are meant to handle this type of scenario.
ExpressionEditor allows for typing, which may not be the ideal if you're looking for a less error-prone scenario (aka, you don't trust users to write queries):
http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#ExpressionEditor/FilteringGridView
Otherwise DataFilter lets users select options based on the items and their respective types found in your collection, so it is much harder for a difficult user to break ;D :
http://demos.telerik.com/silverlight/#DataFilter/FirstLook
Is neither of those fit the bill, can you post more info in regards to your scenario/what you're looking to accomplish (and why you're looking at a 30x30 grid setup for the basis) and we might be able to brainstorm something good up. :)
-Evan

Related

Listbox or Listview or Gridview?

I am trying to achieve this.
I have a list of records (filenames) which I want to show in a list.
Anybody has any idea as to which control to use.
Regards,
Deepak
The information is right at your fingertips. You should learn to use Snoop. Aside from that, you should choose whatever control works best for you, which requires you to learn the difference between each. We can't really provide a good answer because there are many different ways this control could be implemented, and that's why WPF is so powerful.
Basically, you'll want to use a mixture of a Grid and ItemsControl. You can see the layout of the controls that are being used in this screenshot:

Is the winform 'size' property localizable in any way?

I'm in the process of writing a set of documents to help other developers in our office localize various components of a large application. I'm using a tool called Globalizer.NET to do the donkey work and it's very good as it even lets you localize the size and position properties of controls to allow for the likely changes in length of text strings once translated. However, it occurred to me that in some cases I might need to re-size the entire form a bit, but Globalizer doesn't let you do this, and I cannot see any other way of doing this. I have even tried manually adding an entry in the language specific resource file for the form size but it doesn't make any difference.
Ultimately, once it has become a little more established, we'd consider moving to WPF which I understand makes this easier, but for now we can't for a number of reasons.
Is there any way at all to localize this property of a winform? I am beginning to suspect not, but figured I'd ask in case someone else has come up with a workaround.
Don't worry - about a moment after posting this I had a bit of a Homer moment and realised I was trying to use the wrong property - ClientSize is a perfectly localizable property!
Thanks for reading.
Steve

Silverlight - Highlight List<> of words/prhases within TextBox

I am new to Silverlight and have a requirement to highlight (or change font color) all words and phrases wtihin a TextBox that match a list of words/phrases. At first I though this would be easy, but the more I look into it, the more confused I get.
My goal is to write something reusable so I can also apply the logic to a RadGridView later. I've seen a few examples of stuff close to what I need, but it's beyond my Silverlight level at this point.
I want to write this myself to get a better understanding of how some of the Silverlight internals work. Can someone point me in the right direction of where to start on something like this? Should this be implemented in a control? Should I use a behavior? I'm using Silverlight 4.
Once I know where to start, I am sure I can get this done - with some help from you guys of course ;-)
Thanks,
-Scott
How about using the RadRichTextBox (I assume you have a licence for it as you mentionned the RadGridView)?
There's also a good sample project on Telerik forum that is doing exactly what you want to do.

Excel like FILTER feature in Silverlight datagrid?

In Excel, there is this feature for filtering the cells of a column.
How can I implement excel like FILTER feature in Silverlight Datagrid?
Please advice. Thanks
AJ
Good question - this is a good feature, but not one that can be implemented in 5 minutes.
You don't want to be overriding the rendering of the standard datagrid in any way (too much work), so you need to take a slightly different approach. One way to do that is to draw your own 'header' above the top of the grid - just a grid, with a border and a stackpanel will get you started. Then you need to enumerate the visible columns of the grid, and create a dropdown corresponding to each, and add that dropdown to the stackpanel. Using a simple linq statement you can get a list of the distinct values in each column. When the user selects a value from the dropdown you can then filter the grid's datasource using that value in a LINQ statement.
In reality this is probably going to be at least a week's worth of work to do properly. If you take the cost of that development and the cost of the testing, and measure that against the cost of a good component suite where they already have filtering built in (most of the major vendors do), then unless you are working for a very low hourly rate you will find it is cheaper to buy the components - it is probably safer too, as the components will be well tested and realtively bug free.
Edit (some time later): what i should also mention though is that if you only want to do this on a couple of columns then you could consider using a column header template. If you take this approach though you will also have to do things like copy the various mouse related animations or transitions that might be part of the original colunm header, just so you can keep some consistency across the top of the grid. Personally i would just go with option one and give the user the ability to filter on any of the columns.

How to Format Numbers in WinForms 1.1 DataGrid?

Is there a simple way to format numbers in a Winforms 1.1 datagrid? The Format property of the DataGridTextBoxColumn seems to be completely ignored. I know there is a solution that involves subclassing a Column control, and it's fairly simple, but was hoping there might be some trick to making the Format property just work.
My personal opinion is that a datagridcolumnstyle is the way to go. Without seeing the code that you have, I can't say for certain why your formatting isn't taking hold when no style is defined - but mixing in formatting with data calculations and other parts of the code can get very messy very quickly.
Creating a new column style class is very clean, and if you have to use the same formatting again in another datagrid, it's as easy as pie to reuse it.
Here's the Microsoft Documentation that may get you started in the right direction.
I did subclass and it was easy and did work. I still don't like it so much. I was already subclassing column styles for other reasons. I'd rather handle all databinding myself, where I can more easily change it and test it. This whole mixing of the UI with the data is old school, and not in a good way.
Thanks very much for your answers, it's good to have second opinions.
Mike

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