is the Visibility attribute of the Field element the only way to control visibility of a of a column. My object whose collection is used as DataContext has 20 properties yet I want to display only 5 of them in a grid. I don't want to define 20 field elements and set the visiblity of 15 of them to false.
I'm trying to remember how the auto amtchup logic works for choosing the "correct" field layout. I would like to think that if you define fields for a subset of the exposed properties, it would match things up for you. In other words, if you defined just two fields (FullName and Phone) to represent a list of contact objects, wouldn't that work just fine?
If not, you can make your desired field layout (subset of fields) and then programmatically assign that layout to the record in the AssigningFieldLayoutToItem event of the grid.