We have a grid where our customers are requesting that they need to be able to select and copy out the summary values of the grid (along with cell values). We understand that this is not possible with the current version (we are using 10.3).
We have been working on some workarounds for this. The first is to use mouse/keyboard events to handle selecting logic ourselves. We have it almost working, but the code is very sluggish and buggy. We would rather not go this route if there is a better solution.
The second, which we have not played with, has to do with the ISelectableItem and the Selection Strategy methodology. I was reading the information in the following link:
http://help.infragistics.com/Help/NetAdvantage/WinForms/2010.2/CLR2.0/html/Win_Selection_Strategies.html
From what I understand, we cannot just create a new class that inherits from SummaryValue and ISelectableItem and use these on the grid to have them able to be selected. We must implement a custom ISelectionManager that deals with selecting the next item, etc. Am I correct in this assumption?
Do you think it would be more worthwhile for us to use the Selection Strategy methodology? Do you have any examples of using this methodology on a wingrid so that we can select the summary values? We do not have a lot of time to spend on this, so if it is too much work to implement this, then we probably won't go this route.
Any suggestions or help on this would be appreciated (from anyone).
Also, do you ever plan to add this to the base functionality of the wingrid? We have submitted this request in the past but it hasn't been implemented yet.
Hi,
bbdt_travis said:From what I understand, we cannot just create a new class that inherits from SummaryValue and ISelectableItem and use these on the grid to have them able to be selected. We must implement a custom ISelectionManager that deals with selecting the next item, etc. Am I correct in this assumption?
Yes, I beleive that is correct. Implement ISelectableObject would not do you much good unless the SelectionStrategy was updated to know how to deal with those objects. This is probably possible, theoretically, but it would not be trivial to do and unless you have access to the Infragistics source code for the exist SelectionStrategies to use a guide, it would be nearly impossible.Even with the source code, it will probably be very complex and I would not recommend it, especially if you do not have a lot of time.
If I were going to implement this, I'd probably do it manually rather than using the SelectionStrategy approach. But even then, it's not going to be a trivial task.
It might be easier if I knew what kind of assumptions you can make here. What exactly are the requirements?
For example:
In the simplest cases with a flat grid and no OutlookGroupBy, and where users need to be able to select a summary cell (or multiple summary cells) or the entire summary row at once, the implementation would be pretty easy.
In a complicated case with multiple levels of hierarchical data and OutlookGroupBy where you need to select Summary cells/rows in addition to data rows/cells, it will be much more complicated and difficult.
We only need to get this to work for one grid within the application, but unfortunately it has a lot of the functionality turned on and has most of the requirements you listed.
The grid itself has 2 bands, and we are only allowing the user to select cells within the 2nd child band. The parent band is just used to logically separate the data. We are using OutlookGroupBy; they can choose to group by 3 different columns.
Users should be able to select summary cells and/or data cells at the same time. So it would behave exactly like if the summary cells were able to be selected/activated. I think we can get away with disabling the row selection and summary row selections if we can get the other functionality to work.
Currently, we are capturing mouse events and redrawing a rectangle when we enter new cells, and whatever data cell or summary cell is in the rectangle, we are setting the selected appearance. If we land on a data cell or summary cell, we set active appearance. We don't necessarily care if the Selected object is useful since we are creating our own clipboard string.
We have methods that recurse through the grid (regardless of group-by, etc.) to find all cells within a certain rectangle, and also given a top-left and bottom-right cell (or top-right and bottom left) will find all cells in that rectangular region.
The main issue we are having right now is when we need to start scrolling. If the user lets go of the mouse and we are outside of the grid, we cannot figure out how to find the cell that is closest to the mouse location that is within the drawn area of the chart. We have tried many things with no success.
Another issue is with Shift + arrow keys. Since summary values do not activate, when we hit shift+down arrow to try to go to the summary value, it skips over it and goes to the next row, selecting both. We will probably just have to handle this manually, just haven't looked at it yet.
The last big issue is refreshing the selected cells correctly. We obviously don't want to redraw the chart every time the user is holding the left mouse down and moves the mouse. This will probably just take some time to play with and find the states where the grid should redraw.
I think it's just going to take some dev time to figure this out. I mostly wanted to make sure we weren't reinventing the wheel here.
If you have any hints as to the first issue (figuring out the cell closest to the mouse location within the drawn area of the grid), that would be great.