spawning asynchrounous cell update from cell editor

[sprucely]

We have a custom lookup column that performs searches after the user has typed a few characters and paused. It is easy to do this synchronously, since it is simply a matter of overriding GetNewValueFromEditor() and returning the value. Unfortunately this doesn't provide an easy way for us to implement an asynchronous search and update of the cell. We need to allow users to perform a partial edit and then move on to other cells while the asynchronous search/update of the previous cell proceeds.

It's a subclass of GridViewDataColumn, so I have access to BindingTarget and DataMemberBinding. I could spawn from GetNewValueFromEditor() an async delegate that performs the lookup and uses BindingTarget and DataMemberBinding to set the value. Do you see any problems with this approach? Any suggestions on how to better address this?

[Nedyalko Nikolov]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay.

Generally there should be no problem with your approach, because this is what GridViewDataColumn actually do in order to update the value. The only problem is that you will by-pass our UI layer validation provided by Cell(Row)ValidatING events, so you should not count on these events any more. Data layer validation (DataAnnotations, IDataErrorInfo and so on) should work as expected.

All the best,
Nedyalko Nikolov
the Telerik team