built-in merged columns functionality

[Albert Shenker]

Is Telerik by any chance working on a built-in merged columns functionality? The existing suggested work-arounds are ok, but it forces you to use a TemplateColumn, thus losing the benefits of the many strongly-typed columns Telerik has created and it also doesn't work in various scenarios (such as with frozen columns). I'm sure it is more complicated than simply adding a new "item" type above the header item, but this functionality really only consists of grapical representation of spanned columns. Ideally, each column might have a "ColumnGroup" property which defines which columns are grouped together. Or, it might be even more logical for telerik to create a "ColumnGroups collection under the mastertableView like so...

<MasterTableView>
    <ColumnGroup  UniqueName="Something" Header Text="Whatever" Tooltip="Something Cool">
        <Columns>
            <Column....
        </Columns>
    </ColumnGroup>
    <ColumnGroup  UniqueName="SomethingElse" Header Text="Whatever Else">
        <Columns>
            <Column....
        </Columns>
    </ColumnGroup>
</MasterTableView>

[Pavlina]

Hello Albert Shenker,

We appreciate your opinion as a customer and I will pass your request to our developers for further consideration. They will have it in mind along with the input from other customers we have accumulated.

Regards,
Pavlina
the Telerik team