• April 24, 2006
• 2 min read

BindingListView - The DataView equivalent for custom collections

BindingListView is a project hosted on GotDotNet that gives you search, sorting and filtering capabilities to a plain BindingList. For example if you have the following Person entity:

public class Person 
{ 
    string firstName = string.Empty; 
    int age = 0;

    public string FirstName 
    { 
        get { return firstName; } 
        set { firstName = value; } 
    }

    public int Age 
    { 
        get { return age; } 
        set { age = value; } 
    }

    public Person(string firstName, int age) 
    { 
        this.firstName = firstName; 
        this.age = age; } 
    }
}

And you want to have a collection of persons bind to a datagrid, you can simply write the following:

BindingList<Person> persons = new BindingList<Person>(); 
persons.Add(new Person("Bill", 45)); 
persons.Add(new Person("Gert", 33)); 
persons.Add(new Person("Johan", 12)); 
persons.Add(new Person("An", 27));

personsGrid.DataSource = persons;

What if you need to do some filtering, or simply sorting on the datagrid? Therefore you would need to create a custom collection class that implements a bunch of interfaces for having sorting, filtering and searching capabilities.

The BindingListView class has all these functionalities built-in. You simply have to pass a list, and bind the BindingListView to the datagrid. The same way you would do with a DataSet and DataView. This means:

BindingListView<Person> personsView = new BindingListView<Person>(persons); 
personsGrid.DataSource = personsView;

Sorting on a BindingListView is done through the Sort property, the same as on a DataView. For example:

personsView.Sort = "FirstName";

Filtering is done through the Filter property and uses anonymous delegates. So for example to filter all persons that are less than 30, you can write:

personsView.Filter = BindingListView<Person>.CreateItemFilter(
    new Predicate<Person>(delegate(Person person) 
        {
            return (person.Age < 30); 
        } 
    ));

You can also merge multiple sources to one view (functionality that the DataView doesn't support) through the AggregatedBindingListView.