Essential Grid's Grid Grouping Control supports grouping data at design time.
This sample uses a flat data set that has been created with the designer. The group drop area can be added by setting the ShowGroupDropArea property to true. The data can be grouped by a given column by specifying the column name in the TableDescriptor.GroupedColumns property. Also this sample features the Grid Cell's ability to merge cells even with the dynamic change in Grid's layout after Sorting / Grouping
The GroupDropArea supports displaying the Grouped columns in a Hierarchical structue too. To enable this feature the HierarchicalGroupDropArea property must be true. Hierarchical Group support avails the following interactive features with the GridGroupingControl
this.gridGroupingControl1.HierarchicalGroupDropArea = true;
Interactive Features :
this.gridGroupingControl1.GridGroupDropArea.AllowRemove = true;
this.gridGroupingControl1.GridGroupDropArea.TreeLinePlacement = TreeLinePlacement.Bottom;
this.gridGroupingControl1.GridGroupDropArea.DynamicResizing = true;
this.gridGroupingControl1.GridGroupDropArea.TreeLineColor = Color.Red;
When you run the sample, you will see an Employees table grouped by three columns in a Hierarchical structure .
The following is an image which illustrates the GroupDropArea in its default style.
Below is the image of Grid with merged state of cells.