grouping and Column merging question

[Administrator]

I am new to the syncfusion controls, and wanted some quick general direction to help me resolve a couple of development issues so I can convince my boss to buy this control set.
I like the flexibility of the grid, and it seems to be able to do what I need it to, Again just a few quick quesitons.

I am building a grid on the fly at run time based on a Dataset I have returned from a stored procedure with structure information in it. I add Rows and Columns, and I am currently using just the Grid control. I loop through rows and columns I have then added and add a Label value to the first column, and then a data or cell type to the column next to the label column, so that my rows are really Rows of
|Label|CellType|Label|CellType|Label|CellType|

I need to be able to merge columns on a row by row basis. Is this possible? I have a "Note:" field that I need to merge several columns and then add a Rich text editor. Again is column merging available, and a VB sample of it would be awesome.

Second I need to group by the first column, but values are not repeated but occur only once. So my grid looks like this:

|NodeName |Label|CellType|Label|CellType|
| |Label|CellType|Label|CellType|
| |Label|CellType|Label|CellType|
|NodeName2|Label|CellType|Label|CellType|

Where I can group by the first Column. Can I do this in a regular grid, because I do not want the end user to have the option to set this, but I want the + - icons next to Node Name and to show or hide the "child Rows", but again these are not really child rows of data, but structure.

Now once I get through building the grid I then loop through the 30 Label|CellType columns and add the data to the correct cell.

Should I use the gridGroupingControl to achieve this? or in your opinion write my own procedures to show or hide child rows just based on a button click I put in my grid? I know this is long and probably not a clear explanation, but in a nut shell the easiest way to group by and is column merging supported with some sample code to merge columns and headers would be awesome. Thanks

[Clay Burch]

If you want grouping behavior for data that you have in a datatable, then you should be using the GridGroupingControl. It is our bound grid that supports grouping.

Trying to accomplish this kind of functionality is a GridControl would require that you essentially 'build' a GridGroupingControl from the base up.