Hierarchical Grid in 9.2... What’s the big Deal?

2009 volume 2 is going to be a huge release for ASP.NET. Infragistics’ promise to deliver the next generation of ASP.NET controls has been a great success so far. The benefits that the Aikido framework brings to the new ASP.NET AJAX controls are far beyond counting control features. Ability to reuse code across different controls, not only helps us deliver controls faster than ever before, but also makes the core well tested and brings consistency & functionality across the control suite. I will talk more about the ASP.NET 9.2 feature items in another blog, but in this post I want to talk about the biggest item of 9.2 which is of course, the new hierarchical grid control called WebHierarchicalDataGrid. As you can see we are introducing a new control instead of adding this functionality onto the WebDataGrid just because we want to make sure that your pages are kept simple, small and to the best performance possible. WebDataGrid is targeted towards displaying data from a flat structure and it does it well, adding the hierarchical rendering to it meant more “if” & “for loops” in the grid’s core, which in-turn would have added complexity to the grid controls inside and out. As a web page developer you know your data well and the control that would suit  best for your data display needs, so we figured its best that you decide the grid you want to use on your pages.

This is the first release of the grid, and our engineering team has been heads down for the past 6 months and working hard to make sure we release the WebHierarchicalDataGrid with great features. As with any software project, time and resources are scarce and not only do we have to implement features, but also make sure they are quality assured. So, the grid will be packed with the following features when Web Client 2009 Volume 2 is released end of October:

• Multiple children bands display
• Self-Referencing data display
• Uses Pay to Play model
• Sorting
• Paging
• Rows Adding, Updating & Deleting
• Keyboard navigation
• Rows, Cells, Columns selection
• Load on Demand
• Expand/Collapse animations support
• Templated columns
• Hidden Columns
• Auto CRUD
• Auto-Detect column editors for in-cell editing

The list above may look similar to you, since the WebHierarchicalDataGrid inherits most of its features from the WebDataGrid. All the behaviors are supported on all of the grid levels, including paging. So, now you can have a grid that pages’ on root level as well as on the child levels. Stay tuned for more! In the upcoming weeks, I will be blogging more about the performance gains that you’ll get with the WebHierarchicalDataGrid, and talk more about why is it such a big deal for us and could be for your applications as well.

 In the upcoming releases, we will be adding more features to the hierarchical grid, so please keep sharing your feedback. As always, you can email us at productmanager@infragistics.com or reach me directly murtazaa@infragistics.com