Q3 2010 Object-Relational Hierarchy with RadGridView for WinForms

by Nikolay Diyanov

November 13, 2010 Release 0 Comments

[You can see all new hierarchy modes of RadGridView in this week’s webinar. See details and register >>]

More and more developers are using ORM frameworks like Telerik OpenAccess, Entity Framework, and NHibernate to save valuable time from writing dependent and synchronization code for the database server. In many cases it is often necessary to create complex custom business objects that contain the object relations to support the different needs of the application like serialization (database, file storage, online service) and transactions.

In many of these scenarios the developers are looking for a convenient and quick way to visualize the data and execute sorting, filtering and/or grouping. Now they can with the newly extended hierarchical model of RadGridView, which comes with a Object-Relational Hierarchy mode. Here is a quick taste of how easy it is to use:

Autogenerate Hierarchy

Let’s have the following entity model using the well-known Northwind database:

The new version of RadGridView can very easy generate and present this data by using a binding and the AutoGenerateHierarchy property of control:

NorthwindEntities entities = new NorthwindEntities();

var query = from suppliers in entities.Suppliers select suppliers;

this.radGridView1.DataSource = query.ToList();

this.radGridView1.AutoGenerateHierarchy = true;

Here is the result of above lines of code:

RadGridView Autogenerate hierarchy

Manual Hierarchy Genration

Let’s look at another entity model from the Northwind database:

If we want to have better control over the presentation, for example which columns to show in the child template, or you want to show only a branch of the complex hierarchical structure, you can very easy setup the Object-Relational hierarchy manually:

private void Form2_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

NorthwindEntities entities = new NorthwindEntities();

var query = from customers in entities.Customers select customers;

GridViewTemplate childTemplate = CreateChildTemplate();

GridViewRelation relation = new GridViewRelation(this.radGridView1.MasterTemplate, childTemplate);

relation.ChildColumnNames.Add("Orders");

this.radGridView1.Relations.Add(relation);

this.radGridView1.DataSource = query.ToList();

}

private GridViewTemplate CreateChildTemplate()

{

GridViewTemplate childTemplate = new GridViewTemplate();

this.radGridView1.Templates.Add(childTemplate);

GridViewTextBoxColumn column = new GridViewTextBoxColumn("OrderDate");