Custom rows in bound DataGridView

[Rickard]

I am trying to create a custom DataGridView control that displays data
from a DataSet, but with the additional functionality that it shows
"headlines" in the data. Example (pardon my lack of ASCII art skills):

---------------------------------
| Name | Age | Oranges |
---------------------------------
| - Old people |
---------------------------------
| John | 65 | 3 |
| Bill | 75 | 1 |
| Sarah | 77 | 5 |
| Homer | 93 | 4 |
---------------------------------
| - Young people |
---------------------------------
| Emily | 3 | 6 |
| John Jr.| 4 | 13 |
| S | 7 | 54 |
| George | 11 | 1 |

My first thought was to add DataRows for each headline and override the
Paint method to draw whatever I want, but it seems there is no way to
add unbound DataRows in a bound DataGridView, is it?

So is there a simple way of doing this. Working in unbound mode is not
really an option since I need to have a lot of existing code working
with this inherited DataGridView control, and neither is finding a
closed-source third-party control since I need compatibility with
DataGridView + there is a lot of other customizations going into this
inherited control.

I guess what I'm looking for is some way of hooking in between the data
binding and the actual generation of DataRow objects. I tried overriding
the DataRowCollection object, but there seems to be no way of changing
bindings on a row level.

Another approach would be not using DataRows at all, but instead somehow
configure the layout of the grid and do all header painting in the Paint
method of the grid itself, but alas GetRowDisplayRectangle is not
virtual

I really don't know where to look for this change. I have seen one
similar control on CodeProject:
http://www.codeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/OutlookGrid.asp
but unfortunately this control seems to be unbound and requires a lot of
changes to the interfacing.


Any help is appeciated, as I'm quite stuck as it is and not even Google
will help me

/ Richard

 

[Kevin Spencer]

You would need to create your own custom DataGridViewColumn,
DataGridViewCell, and DataGridViewEditingControl classes. Here's an example
on the MSDN2 Library online:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms180996.aspx

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
Short Order Coder
http://unclechutney.blogspot.com

The devil is in the yada yada yada

 

[Rickard]

Kevin,
Thank you, but what I need is to have custom rows, not columns. Not all
rows should be custom, and there should be unbound rows in my
datagridview, just as one normally uses unbound columns in a bound grid.
If this is impossible to do, I would like to position the rows manually
instead to achieve the same goal.

/ R