Introduction

Data binding refers to the process of automatically setting properties of one or more form controls at run time from a structure that contains data. More interesting point is binding of custom objects; one of these cases is binding of two dimensional arrays to DataGrid.

The thing is little bit tricky, but in general, it consists of implementing some classes which represent view of the data and they in order need to implement ending list of interfaces.

Here, you can see interfaces and internal class structure of the library.

Using the Code

It is very simple.

//
// 1. Create two dimensional array
//
const int  dim = 1000;

double[,]  array = new double[dim,dim];

Random ran = new Random();
for(int r = 0; r < dim; r++)
{
    for(int c = 0; c < dim; c++)
    {
        array[r,c] = (ran.Next(dim)); // fill it with random numbers.
    }
}

// 2. Create ArrayDataView class in which 
// constructor you pass the array 
// and assign it to DataSource property of DataGrid. 

 dataGrid1.DataSource = new ArrayDataView(array);

When you change data in array and want to see update in DataGrid, you need to call Reset method of ArrayDataView class. You can use all kinds of base types like double, int32, string and so on.

In addition, there is a constructor with additional parameter which is array of column names, length must be equal to columns of the array, if not, exception is raised.

History

7^th January, 2004: Created
29^th January, 2004: Source code of library added

License

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Binding a Two Dimensional Array to a DataGrid