Hi,

Out of curiosity, is there any particular reason you are using an UltraCombo for this? Unless you need multi-select or EditorButtons or a DataFilter, it would be more efficient to use an UltraDropDown control as the column's ValueList.

HOWTO:What is the best way to place a DropDown list in a grid cell?

Anyway, there's no really easy way to do this. You will probably need to use a CreationFilter or a DrawFilter. Iw ould probably go with the CreationFilter, myself, so you can change the text in the cell without having to handle the actual drawing of the text.

Here's a sample of what the CreationFilter might look like. This code was written for using a ValueList, since that's the more common case. It may not work when using UltraCombo as an editor. In such a case, you would have to change around where I get the ValueListResolved to instead get the EditorControlResolved and cast it into an IValueList.

    public class ItemNotInListIndicatorText_CreationFilter : IUIElementCreationFilter
    {
        #region IUIElementCreationFilter Members

        void IUIElementCreationFilter.AfterCreateChildElements(UIElement parent)
        {
            // See if the element is an EditorWithTextDisplayTextUIElement.
            EditorWithTextDisplayTextUIElement editorWithTextDisplayTextUIElement = parent as EditorWithTextDisplayTextUIElement;
            if (editorWithTextDisplayTextUIElement != null)
            {
                // Get the associated grid cell. 
                UltraGridCell cell = editorWithTextDisplayTextUIElement.GetContext(typeof(UltraGridCell)) as UltraGridCell;

                // Get the ValueList from the cell. 
                IValueList valueList = cell.ValueListResolved;
                if (valueList != null)
                {
                    // Find an item on the list that matches the value of the cell. 
                    int index = -1;
                    valueList.GetText(cell.Value, ref index);

                    // If index is -1, it means no matching item was found. 
                    if (index == -1)
                    {
                        // Set the text on the element to some useful display text. 
                        editorWithTextDisplayTextUIElement.Text = "INVACTIVE USER";
                    }

                }
            }
        }

        bool IUIElementCreationFilter.BeforeCreateChildElements(UIElement parent)
        {
            // Do nothing
            return false;
        }

        #endregion
    }

This won't do anything once the cell goes into edit mode. I'm not sure what you would want to do in that case, since setting the actual edit text to a string would not be able to find a matching ID with witch to update the data source. If you are using DropDownList Style or the column is not editable, then that won't matter.