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Essential Grid is a Cell-Oriented control and allows you to apply styles at the cell level. Individual cells can be customized in different formats. Every cell in a grid control is associated with a list of attributes that affect the appearance of the grid cells.
Cell Styles
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Multiple cells can be covered to exhibit the behavior of a single cell. This makes it easy to display special items such as titles and bitmaps such that they occupy multiple cells.
Covered cells blend seamlessly with Essential Grid's keyboard navigation model. Covered cells can also host any Essential Grid control type. They can be interactively created and cleared by end users. Formatted covered cells with their own borders are illustrated below:
Covered Cells
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Banner cells allow the user to combine the background of neighboring cells to display a background image or gradient brush. Users can load an image from a file on disk and display it in the cell as a gradient among cells or create custom cell backgrounds.
Banner Cells
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Merged cells allow users to display adjoining cells with like values as a single cell. The merging is dynamic. If a cell's value changes, the grid will automatically adjust the merged cells.
Merged Cells
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Essential Grid supports alpha blending and background bitmaps. The alpha value can be applied to individual cells or base styles by changing the interior cell attribute.
Grid with Background Alpha Blend
Users can also switch the grid to a 'transparent' mode that skips all backgrounds in cells. Only the text inside the cells, borders and grid lines will be displayed.
Grid in Transparent Mode
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All Essential Grid drawing code is implemented using GDI+. GDI+ is the C++ based version of its predecessor GDI (Graphics Device Interface).GDI+ is an improved 2D graphics environment with advanced features such as anti-aliased 2D graphics, floating point coordinates, gradient shading, more complex path management, intrinsic support for modern graphics-file formats like JPEG and PNG.
This enables Essential Grid cells to display gradients, rotate text and support transparency.
Gradient Cell-Using GDI+
Totated Text-Using GDI+
Transparent Cell-Using GDI+
Several grid components on the market use GDI interop undercover. With Essential Grid, users will find no such "hidden" code. Use of GDI+ in all aspects makes Essential Grid more extensible. Users can easily add code that customizes or extends a drawing selectively without any GDI interop issues.
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The appearance of the Grid Control can be enhanced by applying one of the several MS Office 2003, MS Office 2007 and Vista styles available.
MS Office 2007 Blue
MS Office 2007 Black
MS Office 2007 Silver
MS Office 2003
Windows Vista
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Essential Grid cell properties can be set and displayed using the standard Windows Forms 'Property Grid'. Multiple cells can be formatted at one time just as in Microsoft Excel.
Property Grid Format in Essential Grid
Wherever possible, Essential Grid takes advantage of existing framework classes. This ensures a consistent user interface and also reduces the effort required to effectively use the product.
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The GridControl can quickly display huge volumes of data in the virtual mode. The data can be stored in an external datastructure and supplied on demand. In virtual mode, users can bind the GridControl to any external data without having to give the grid control over the datasource.
The GridControl can easily support billions of rows without compromising performance.
Grid Control With Large NUmber of Rows
Virtual mode can also be used in combination with a regular grid or a databound grid. Users can choose to supply specific cells on-demand whereas other calls can be loaded from the grid internally.
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Columns and rows can be interactively resized. Essential Grid supports Undo of the Size action. This can be achieved by double-clicking the header borders.
Single Column-Resize
Users can also size multiple columns at a time by selecting the required columns and sizing one column from that selection.
Multiple Columns-Resized
Resize support for rows and columns is especially useful in light of the excellent support for the Undo/Redo8 command in Essential Grid. Users can alter grid layout to suit their needs.
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Frozen columns and rows stay stationary much like the default headers when the rest of the grid is scrolled. They are very useful when an application requires header rows or columns in addition to default headers.
Four Column Headers-Frozen
Frozen columns are moved to the far left of the grid and remain there when the grid is scrolled.
Frozen Columns
Frozen rows are moved to the top of the grid and remain there when the grid is scrolled.
Frozen Rows
Frozen rows and columns are typically used in reporting applications where there is a need for extensive header information. A unique aspect of Essential Grid's frozen rows and columns is that they can be configured to any cell type. They do not have to look like the header row.
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Users can resize a row or column until it disappears and then double click the header border to make it re-appear. Rows and columns can be programmatically hidden using method calls.
Interactive hiding of rows and columns is a very user-friendly feature that greatly enhances the usability of grids that have extesive details.
Hidden Third Row and Third Column
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Essential Grid can simulate a listbox control. All three listbox modes are supported: One, multi-simple and multi-extended. The listbox can be bound to any collection or ADO.NET table.
Grid Listbox-One Select Mode
Grid Listbox-Multi-Simple Select Mode
Grid Listbox-Multi-Extended Select Mode
The grid listbox can be used as the listbox part of a Combo box with auto-complete support. Both the 'Drop-Down with autocomplete support' style and the 'Drop-Down List' style known from regular Combo boxes are supported.
Grid with Combo Box
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Essential Grid provides complete clipboard support. Users can Copy/Paste inside the grid and from-or-to other OLE(Object Linking and Embedding) DND(Drag-and-Drop) enabled applications that understand text format. OLE DND between two Essential Grids includes a custom format that allows users to copy or move complete style information including covered cells. Essential Grid also provides hooks for the easy addition of support for custom data formats.
OLE DND in Progress
Copy/Paste and drag-and-drop operations retain all formatting when performed between Essential Grid controls.
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An MS Access like Record Navigation Bar lets users scroll records in a table. The total number of records can also be displayed in the navigation bar next to the current record number.
MS Access Like Record Navigation Bar
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The Grid Control view can be split into different sections using the SplitterControl in Essential Studio.
Split Display of Records
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Essential Grid extends its support to (MDI) Multiple Document Interface by allowing users to work with multiple grid controls at the same time.
MDI Support
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Essential Grid provides extensive support for keyboard handling.
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Arrow keys-move current cell
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PageUp/PageDown key-scroll grid by page
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F2-activate/deactivate cell
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F4+ALT-Drop-Down/Close-UP cell
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CTRL + Arrow keys-move to first/last, row/column
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SHIFT + Arrow keys-select cell
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DELETE key-delete cell
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CTRL+X, CTRL+V, CTRL+C, INSERT key and DELETE key support common clipboard operations
All keyboard operations can be customized.
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Essential Grid's mouse and hit test operations are implemented using a special MouseController pattern. This allows easy plug-in of custom mouse operations pertaining to different hit test contexts.
As Cursor Moves Over Button-Button Appearance Changes-Users Get Tactile Feedback
This architecture fully supports the Windows Forms Framework with events such as MouseHover, MouseLeave and MouseEnter.
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Essential Grid supports versioned serialization of grid data to binary and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)formats. Future versions of Essential Grid will automatically read legacy files from earlier versions. Versioning is a must for applications that are expected to have a long market life-span. However, many third party .NET controls on the market do not implement versioning as the default serialization provided in Windows Forms framework does not support versioning.
Serialization to SOAP Formatted XML File
Essential Grid can be saved in SOAP format:gridControl.SaveSoap(filename).
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The GridControl contents can be exported to MS Excel.
Grid Control to be Exported
Grid Contents Exported to MS Excel
Microsoft Excel file contents can also be imported to the GridControl.
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The Grid Control's contents can be exported to an MS Word file. It also supports drawing custom header and footer.
Grid Control to be Exported
Grid Control's Contents Exported to MS Word
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Essential Grid provides complete support for printing and print preview.
Print Preview
There is a special mode to display the grid in gray scale. This is especially useful when printing a grid using black ink. The gray scale print will exhibit finer discrimination between cells when compared to prints in regular color mode.
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