In this section, we are going to discuss a classic element of traditional user interfaces: the (data) grid. We are going to learn how to use it, bind it to data, and customize its visual appearance.Â
Every desktop data-centric application out there has a data grid somewhere. For a long time, the default data structure has been the rectangular shaped dataset and its natural representation is a grid.
A grid is a collection of rows, each consisting of a collection of columns. The number of rows is variable, while the number of columns is fixed for each dataset. When we are dealing with (relational) databases as a source of data, the number of rows is usually linked to the number of records of a result set and the number of columns depends on the table structure (or structure of tables involved in a query). Aside from the database-related datasets, a very common example of a grid component is a spreadsheet, something that has been available in the IT world for decades...
