Multiple Row Column Headers

[Christian]

Hey I have seen that in the WPF forum a similar question has already been asked and figured that something similar should be supported for this RadDataGrid in MAUI as well. Can one simply transform the WPF solution to MAUI?

[Lance | Senior Manager Technical Support]

Hi Christian,

The short answer is no, it not an option. Yes, .NET MAUI and WPF are both using XAML and C#, the underlying frameworks are not the same. Although they can both be compiled with .NET 7 for example, the presentation frameworks are very different. You can't just convert a XAML TextBlock to Label and call it a day.

You could write a custom Handler to render a native control using .NET MAUI (you can think of a handler as a 'wrapper' around a native control), but there's a few roadblocks here:

• There's no iOS, Mac or Android sibling for the Windows RadGridView, so your handler would only work for Windows.
• More importantly however, is the fact that .NET MAUI does not use WPF for Windows platform (it uses WinUI 3)

So, the approach we've taken is to build the MAUI DataGrid from scratch, using the most performant APIs available to us that works on every target platform. For example, that text you see in the DataGrid's cell? That's not a Label control, it's done with high performance drawing APIs. Using standard Label would have a significant performance impact, which is why any community-written DataGrids you might have seen do not have good performance or UI virtualization techniques.

Moving Forward

So what are your paths to get multiple row column headers?  The best one is to open a Feature Request, this gets logged in the work items backlog for the development team, the PM and engineering teams use these items when planning features for upcoming releases.

I have gone ahead and done this for you, and included a live demo link to clarify exactly which feature it is => DataGrid: Multiple Row Column Headers (telerik.com). If you'd like to add any clarification, or if I described it incorrectly, please add a reply.

Professional Services

If this is (or anything) a business-critical feature and you need it immediately, we do have Professional Services partners that can do this for you (or with you). They have both "Feature Acceleration" "Custom App Development", but in this case they're be for the same thing... building this feature for you. 

1. Go to App Development, Consulting, Training and Outsourcing Services - Telerik
2. Select "Feature Acceleration" at the bottom

Though, this is not included in the product license, so it would be a separate contract that you arrange with a 3rd party to do the work. I typically don't mention this in the normal course of technical support replies, especially in the forums, but in your case I thought it might be helpful to know if its existence.

Regards,
Lance | Manager Technical Support
Progress Telerik

[Christian]

Thank you very much :)