Objective Grid for Microsoft .NET includes several types of grids:
Regular Grid — You fill the grid with data at startup. The user can edit cells. Changes are stored in the grid.
Virtual Grid — You maintain the data to be displayed in the grid using a data structure or an external file. The grid generally does not store cell contents in memory. You do not fill the grid at startup. Instead, you handle the GetStyleRowCol event to supply data on demand. Before it draws the cells on the screen, Grid .NET raises the GetStyleRowCol event only for the currently visible cells. If you want the user to be able to edit cells, you need to handle the StoreStyleRowCol event and store the changes back into your custom data source. Grid .NET invokes the StoreStyleRowCol event whenever a cell is changed. For more information, see Chapter 4, "Virtual Grids."
Formula Grid —You enable the formula engine and fill the grid with data at startup. Cells can contain formulas that reference other cells. When the user edits cells, changes are stored in the formula engine. If a cell that is referenced by a formula is changed, the referring cell is automatically updated.
Browser Grid —A Browser Grid is similar to a Virtual Grid, but the Browser Grid is designed with certain characteristics of record-based data sources in mind. You cannot directly access data in any record. Instead, you loop through the records in order to access the desired record. Then you can read data from the current record and make changes. When the user starts editing a record, changes should only be written back to the recordset when the user navigates to a new record. Therefore, Objective Grid for Microsoft .NET holds changes to the current record in a buffer and flushes this buffer only when the user moves to a new record. Browser Grid also lets the user append rows. The appearance of Browser Grid is similar to MS Access query views.
Objective Grid for Microsoft .NET provides an ADO.NET Browser Grid implementation.
These guidelines will help you decide what kind of grid to use:
Do you need formula support?
Use a Formula Grid.
Does your grid have a large number of rows?
Use a Virtual Grid.
Do you maintain data in an external data source or custom data structure?
Use an ADO.NET Browser Grid.
Do you want the grid to directly operate on your data?
Use Virtual Grid. You do not have to copy all the data at startup into the grid.
Do you want to copy the data into your grid?
Use Regular Grid. At startup you fill the grid with your data. The 1stGrid tutorial demonstrates this kind of grid.
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