Hi Sam,
I decided early on not to be using any dataset or datatables, since I could not bind them dynamically to say a fancylistview – instead rather I figured I could just populate a <list> of ListViewItem (s) say something like having a class AddressBookItem : ListViewItem
and then have a method say BuildAddressBookView() which will do something like
this.SubItems.Clear();
this.Text = this.FileName;
this.SubItems.Add(this.Name);
this.SubItems.Add(this.Age);
return this;
to build the current “AddressBookView” and perhaps have another method with different fields to build the “BussinessCardView” and again return “this” aswell; (key there is that subitems.clear() ensures that this does not have any junk leftover from any previous Build calls; - and this seems to work well and I am happy with the OO nature… one problem I run into is that having non static column fields I cannot say use one set of enum ColumnFields (like say shown on your blog) –unless I would want to create every single possible column field and then just hide them by setting width to 0 but that would suck! So when implementing any sorting i.e. ListViewColumnSorter I had to go to great length to match a SortColumn (int) column index to a particular column to determine how to handle it based on the current view.
Had to use a static field or could use a delagete so that the customsorter may check this public field to determine the column that was clicked and use that like:
switch (MainTabUserControl.columnSortClickName.ToLower())
{
case "age":
// sort as number
break;
}
Ultimately I am happy that I can now sort dynamically allocated fields and GDI+ drawn items too and build it nicely using something like
FancyListView.Items.Add(item.ConvertToListView(ViewType.AddressBook));
// or
FancyListView.Items.Add(item.ConvertToListView(ViewType.BusinessCard));
Etc.
Your blog helped a lot too – thank you
