Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Add Images and Controls to the DataGridView

To create a custom column with the DataGrid, you needed to implement the functionality yourself by deriving a custom DataGridColumnStyle class that would need dozens of lines of code. The DataGridView provides a much simpler model. In fact, you can add new columns right alongside your data-bound columns!

Note

There's a lot more that you can do with theDataGridView, including adding static buttons and images.

How do I do that?

In many scenarios, it's useful to display a button next to each row in a grid. Clicking this button can then remove a record, add an item to a shopping cart, or call up another window with more information. The DataGridView makes this easy with the DataGridViewButtonColumn class. You simply need to create a new instance, specify the button text, and add it to the end of the grid:

' Create a button column.
Dim Details As New DataGridViewButtonColumn( )
Details.Name = "Details"
    
' Turn off data-binding and show static text.
' (You could use a property from the table by setting
' the DataPropertyName property instead.)
Details.UseColumnTextForButtonValue = False
Details.Text = "Details..."
    
' Clear the header.
Details.HeaderText = ""
    
' Add the column.
DataGridView1.Columns.Insert(DataGridView1.Columns.Count, Details)

Once you've performed this easy task, you can intercept the CellClick event to perform another action (Figure 3-14 shows the result of this simple test):

Private Sub DataGridView1_CellClick(ByVal sender As System.Object, ...