All entries for Saturday 22 October 2005

AggregateBindingListView

Writing about web page http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=ccbb6b50-6c55-4291-b191-f5c5f80ba122

It took an afternoon of coding (and about a day or so of background thought process from the past month), but I finally created a working data-bindable aggregate object list view class. It grew out of the BindingListView project . The extension is that now multiple source lists of items can be merged into a single view. This view can then be sorted, filtered and searched.
An example of where this is useful would be an RSS feed reader application. Here you would want to show a single feed's list of items and also allow the user to view all items from all feeds. The user should be able to sort the items and search, etc, even when viewing all items from all feeds. The AggregateBindingListView does just that!

The plain old BindingListView is infact a degenerate case of the aggregate class, i.e. has just one source list of items. I have therefore now made it simply inherit from AggregateBindingListView and add an additional constructor that takes the list to view.

One special point for people using the ABLV class, the "NewItemsList" property must be set before items can be added using UI controls like the DataGrid. That way the ABLV knows which list to add the new item to. Otherwise adding new items in that way is disabled. (BindingListView automatically sets that property in the constructor, so no changes needed there.)

I'm very happy with the code and have put together a simple RSS reader application to test it. More testing is required, since the concept of merging multiple lists and keeping things like additions, edits, deletes in sync is by no means straight forward. I also need to complete/update the XML documentation. A further addition to the library would be a class to parse SQL style filter predicates. (We already have a SQL sort property implemented.) This is a fair amount of work, but would allow things like:
view.ApplyFilter("Name LIKE 'A*' and Age >= 18")
Currently only coded filters (classes that implement IFilter) exist.

Any interested coders are welcome to join the GotDotNet workspace linked above.

: 22 Oct 2005 21:37 |  Tags: Coding Csharp Data Binding Dotnet OOP |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Music this week

: 22 Oct 2005 13:40 |  Tags: Music Not Coding |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem