turn off sorting in grouped grid?

[Daniel Chait]

I see there''s a SortBehavior property on the DataBoundGrid control, but I dont see the equivalent in GroupingGrid.

What I want is to turn off the default sorting behavior, and instead make it act like Excel, where clicking on a column header should select that column.

[Administrator]

No, this kind of selection behavior is not supported at the moment. We will have to add some hook and/or properties to add support for it, turn off the regular behavior.

One question:

What feature of the grouping engine do you use/plan to use with the grid?

I am just wondering if it would make sense instead to use a virtual grid that displays records from a grouping engine table instead.

Stefan

[Daniel Chait]

We plan on using Grouping, Sorting, Custom Summaries, Column re-arranging, multi-selection (of cells, rows & columns)... not sure what else, but that kind of stuff. Basically we want it as a sort of mini Microsoft Excel.

[Administrator]

Ok, with all these features it''s best to stick with GridGroupingControl. But things like Excel-like selection weren''t really in our mind when we did the grouping grid, so I guess there will be a couple more issues where we''ll have to provide support for or add hooks.

It won''t work all right out of the box as it is now.

AllowSorting, AllowDragColumns will be some properties that we''ll be adding and some events to let users dynamically enable/disable behavior based on column.

I''ll also have to check how Excel-like selection can be better integrated.

There is one issue that makes Excel-like selection quite tricky with grouping grid. When you select cells that span across rows in different groups, there is the issue that underlying grid-based selection mechanism is based on rows and columns, not on records. So when you expand a group the selection will not change and records that were previously selected will not be selected anymore. Same issue with sorting. Are such issues of any concern for you?

With grouping grid the plan going forward is to proivde a completely different/alternative selection mechanism where each record has "IsSelected" flag. But that will only work with a record-selection based mechanism not cell-based selection. You could then choose between the old mechanism with above issues or the new record-based selection mechanism.

Stefan