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The interior of any cell in the grid can be solid, with one of the several patterns or gradient colors.
Different cell interior styles
The interior of any cell can be fully customized using the Windows Forms designer. Users may layout intricate patterns and gradients with just a few mouse clicks.
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Base styles are also referred to as parent styles. Groups of cells can depend on the same base style. Whenever the common base style changes, all the dependent cells are automatically updated.
Base styles applied for different regions in the grid
Base styles make conditional formatting very easy. Consider working on a process monitoring station. With base styles, a user can define the style for alerts in a single style and then have that style automatically applied whenever the conditions are met. Without base styles, this would involve laborious updates to individual cells.
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Text color customization options are available for individual cells of the grid.
Cells with different text color
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Border customization options are available for each individual cell.
Cells with various border styles
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Individual cells can have different control types. One cell can be a TextBox and the cell next to it can be a ComboBox. Users may change the control type of a cell.
Different cell types
Cell types are implemented using a highly efficient fly-weight pattern based architecture. Thousands of cells can share the same control instance providing tremendous savings in resources. This enables Essential Grid to handle billions of rows with ease.
Essential Grid comes with a wide variety of cell types. Whatever the need, there is a cell type that does the job.
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Text alignment can greatly improve the visual appearance of a grid interface. Complete support for horizontal, vertical and text alignments are available while using the grid controls.
Cells in different alignment settings
These alignment options can be defined individually for each cell, row or column.
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The angle at which cell text is rendered is controlled by this setting.
Cells with different orientation
GDI+ provides excellent support for drawing text at different angles.The GridControl makes use of this GDI+ feature to provide cell text that can be oriented at any angle.
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Specifies the format to be used for display. Can be Date, Numeric or Currency Text. Custom formatting is also supported.
Different formatting styles
Formatting plays a very important role in usability. While using the GridControl, users may format the grid user interface for maximum usability with very little effort.
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Multiple choices can be provided using a single collection list. This is used by controls such as the ComboBox that need to present the user with multiple choices.
Cell displaying its choice list
Choice List illustrates a very important aspect of GridControl's cell attribute architecture. Instead of presenting a disparate cell attribute API with special calls for formatting different control types, the GridControl provides a consistent attribute model. Different cell types may interpret attributes with slight variation but the usage model itself conveys a consistent interface. This design aspect greatly helps cut down the time required to master the GridControl.
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Images can be added to enhance the appearance of individual grid cells. Text cells and static cells can display images and text together. Custom controls can hold large images.
Text cells with images
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Individual cells in the GridControl can be bound to a data source, if needed.
The country column has a bound ComboBox in it
This is a very useful feature to restrict entry to a list of values based on a foreign key. It presents the user with a very intuitive interface and does all the validation.
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ShowButtons is a feature that provides options to specify when to display cell buttons for ComboBoxes and DropDown cells. Possible options are: never, only for current cell, only for current row or always.
Grid with cell buttons displayed for current row only
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Grid cells can be prevented from being edited at runtime in the ReadOnly Mode. When a cell is in the Read Only mode, it can be selected, but no changes to the cell value can be made. Another attribute, Enabled, prevents the cell from being selected.
Read Only and disabled cells
Users can select the Read Only cell, unlike disabled cells which can neither be edited.
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The height of the cell gets auto - adjusted if the edited text does not fit in the cell, providing an excel like feel.
Cell with auto size mode set
This feature comes in handy when data with variable lengths are entered.
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When cell text does not fit in a single line, it can be wrapped in multiple lines.
Cell with wrap text mode set
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Specifies if the cell should handle the "Enter" key event to introduce a line break. This proves to be effective only when Word Wrap has been set to allow multiple lines in the cell.
Cell with allow enter mode set
The default behavior of the Enter key is to lead to the next cell.
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