Getting the Most Out of the .NET Framework PropertyGrid Control

Getting the Most Out of the .NET Framework PropertyGrid Control

I started tinkering with the PropertyGrid control today. It sure makes it easy to build advanced edit UI's quickly. It has provisions for creating custom drop down boxes and such.

I got a little stuck when I introduced the DataSet object to the PropertyGrid Control. It displays *ALL* of the rows' public properties:



To mask the unwanted properties I created a DataRow facade:

	public class HouseFacade

	{

		private HouseDataset.HouseRow _currentRow;



		public void SetCurrentRow(HouseDataset.HouseRow row)

		{

			_currentRow = row;

		}



		[CategoryAttribute("Address"),

			ReadOnlyAttribute(false),

			Description("The street address")]

		public string Address 

		{

			get { return (_currentRow["Address"] as string ); }

			set { _currentRow["Address"] = value; }

		}



		[CategoryAttribute("Address"),

			ReadOnlyAttribute(false),

			Description("name of the city")]

		public string City

		{

			get { return(_currentRow["City"]); }

			set	{ _currentRow["City"] = value; }

		}

This gives me a bit more control, because now I can set the PropertyGrid related attributes (CategoryAttribute, Description, etc).



(The HouseFacade class is a great case for code generation.)