I was trying to overcome one of the shortfalls in ASP.NET 2.0′s built-in controls today and stumbled on a gem: an extended GridView control that was built by Bilal Haidar.
The problem I ran into came up when I defined a fixed height for a GridView control. If you don’t define a fixed height, the GridView dynamically changes its height when you page/sort, etc. This can obviously be a design problem, so I definitely like to avoid it. The thing is, if you go ahead and define a fixed height and then page to a view with only a couple of rows, the rows that do exist expand in height to fill up to the defined height. This can also be a major design problem.
Well, the search for a solution led me to XGrid.
First of all, and most importantly, this is not a completely rewritten control; it, rather, extends on the core capabilities of ASP.NET 2.0′s GridView control. There are lots of custom Grid controls out there, including Telerik’s AJAX-enabled r.a.d.grid and ComponentArt’s Grid for ASP.net, but most of them are rewritten from scratch.
Here’s a highlight [at least for me] of the added features; a complete list of the XGrid control’s features is available at ASPAlliance.com:
- Single row and double row click events
- Context menu for each row
- GridView height fixed when number of rows is less than fixed height
- Built-in filter textbox
You can download the new control from the following link: http://authors.aspalliance.com/bhaidar/946.zip. To install, grab the CustomControls.dll from the bin directory, put it in your site’s bin directory, and add the controls to your toolbox in Visual Studio.
Happy gridding!