At what point in the server's page/controls lifecycle should I re-order columns

[David]

Scenario

I am creating a user control that contains a RadGrid. The user control will have properties that specify the order of the columns in the RadGrid. I plan on using code similar to the snippet taken from http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/grid-reordering-columns.html

GridColumnCollection cols = grid.MasterTableView.Columns;
GridColumn c = cols.FindByUniqueName(columnName);
if (c != null){
    int start = c.OrderIndex;
    for (int i= start; i < cols.Count; i++)
    {
        c = cols[i];
        if (i < cols.Count - 1)
            c.OrderIndex = i+1;
        else
            c.OrderIndex = start;
    }
}

Question
1. At what point in the pages life cycle should the code be executed? (i.e. page_load, page_init etc)
2. If I do not want to execute the code based on the page lifecycle, are there event(s) based on the RadGrid's life cycle that can be used to execute the code? (i.e. RadGrid1_Init, RadGrid1_Load, RadGrid1_PreRender, RadGrid1_ColumnCreated etc)
3. Any gotcha's I should be aware about?

[Kostadin]

Hello David,

An appropriate event to execute the logic from the help article is PreRender and call rebind after that. Note that OrderIndex is not assign earlier and you will not be able to change the column order. Please check out the following code snippet.

protected void Page_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    GridColumnCollection cols = RadGrid1.MasterTableView.Columns;
    GridColumn c = cols.FindByUniqueName("Column2");
    if (c != null)
    {
        int start = c.OrderIndex;
        for (int i = start; i < cols.Count; i++)
        {
            c = cols[i];
            if (i < cols.Count - 1)
                c.OrderIndex = i + 1;
            else
                c.OrderIndex = start;
        }
    }
    RadGrid1.Rebind();
}

Additionally you can check out the following help article which elaborates more on RadGrid's page live cycle.

Regards,
Kostadin
Telerik