GridDataBoundGrid vs. GridGroupingControl

[Aleem Mawani]

Hi,

I was just wondering the what the major differences (besides the obvious grouping support) between the gridDataBoundGrid control and the GridGrouping control were. I am trying to decide which control to use in our product and it would be helpful to see what some of the tradeoffs are between using the two different controls. Grouping would be a great feature, but what do I give up by using the grid grouping control? So far it is my understanding that the grouping control has a superset of functionality over the grid data bound grid. Is this correct?

Thanks in advance.

[Administrator]

The GridGroupingControl has additional overhead to track and support the grouping, summaries, nested tables etc. Becuase of this, the GridDataBoundGrid might have a smaller runtime footprint. Currently, the initialization of the GridGroupingControl potentially takes more time as it is building its internal datastructures that the GridDataBoundGrid does not have.

So, to make your decision, you should just try using a each control on a form with a representative DataSource to see if these resource/timing differences are of a concern to you.

[Aleem Mawani]

Besides performance issues there aren''t any other differnce besides GROUPING that the grouping control has?

What about hiearchial data sets and such?

[Administrator]

GridGroupingControl supported nested child grids, meaning the children may have a differernt number of columns than a parent. In a GridDataBoundGrid, parent child grids share a single grid, so they must somehow have teh same number of columns displayed. (Now, the LayoutColumns property in the GridDataBoundGrid sort of hides this requirement, but it is really one grid).

GridGroupingControl supports multicolumn sorting, and this requires an add-on helper class in GridDataBoundGrid.

Currently, GridGroupingControl does not have a FilterBar UI (though you can programatically do complex filtering). The GridDataBoundGrid does have a FilterBar. The GridDataBoundGrid is simpler to use since you can just index the grid to retrieve a row and column value. In a GridGroupingControl, there is no indexer (since you may have many rows in a grouping grid that do not map directly to a row in the DataSource). So, it is a little more involved to access ''cells'' in a GridGroupingControl.

[Aleem Mawani]

Thanks for the info.

[Administrator]

As was mentioned above, it is possible to replicate some of the features that the GridGroupingCOntrol has in the GridDataBoundGrid. Are there ways to implement the following features in the GridDataBoundGrid:

- Nested child tables
- Grouping
- multi-column sorting

If so, could anyone point me to some documentation on how it would work. I''m basically seeing if its feasible (but not necessarily the best way) to use the GridDataBoundGrid over the GridGroupingControl because we already make use of the GridDataBoundGrid elsewhere and I dont particullarily want to migrate all this code over to a new control.

Thanks.

[Administrator]

You can see do multicolumn sorting using the technique in this KB.
http://www.syncfusion.com/Support/article.aspx?id=10489

You can display hierarchical relations in a straight-forward manner with in-place expansion of the child tables, but it does not use true nested grids in doing so. See the Grid\Samples\DataBound\Hierarchical\ExpandGrid sample.

I do not know of any simple way to implement grouping in a GridDataBoundGrid.

[Administrator]

Looking at the sample Grid\Samples\DataBound\Hierarchial\ExpandGrid, is there any way to have the column headers that are associated with each nested level to be displayed at that particular level and not all of them at the top? I want it to look similar to Grid\Samples\Grouping\HierarchySample.

- Aleem

[Administrator]

I know of no simple way (or even a moderately hard way) to do this.