One of the most powerful aspects of .NET and Windows Forms is data binding. Data binding is the process of associating user interface (UI) elements with a data source to generate a visual representation of data. Two types of data binding are available for Windows Forms: Simple Data Binding and Complex Data Binding.
Simple data binding allows you to bind one data element to a control. In many situations you want to display only one record at a time e.g., customer’s personal information. Textboxes and labels are such controls that are used for this purpose and hence called simple binding.
Complex data binding allows you to bind more than one data element to a control. For example if you want to display number of orders placed by a customer you would use controls like data grid controls, list boxes.
The data binding capabilities of .NET are similar to ADO and the Visual Basic controls. Visual Basic or Delphi users will find .NET data binding more flexible and more transparent. It saves a lot of time in both Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications.
How to Bind TierDeveloper DataSet to Data Grid Control
Assumptions
You are using TierDeveloper’s sample project “TDevStoreSQL.tier” and you’ve defined a query method “GetAllCustomers” for the object “Customers”. You have generated the components and Windows Forms Application from TierDeveloper. You have access to a database, such as Microsoft SQL Server™ or Microsoft Access. In order to bind Data Grid please follow these steps: -
1. Open the TierDeveloper generated project in VS.NET
2. Add and open a new Windows Form.
3. Select the ToolBox window and click on Windows Forms tab.
4. Drag DataGrid component and place it anywhere on the Windows Form.
5. Paste the following code in the Windows Form Load event.
[Visual Basic]Private Sub CustomersForm_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load Dim cf As CustomersFactory = New CustomersFactory DataGrid1.CaptionText = "Customers" DataGrid1.DataSource = cf.GetAllCustomersDS()End Sub
[C#]Private void CustomersForm_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e){ CustomersFactory cf = New CustomersFactory(); DataGrid1.CaptionText = "Customers" ; DataGrid1.DataSource = cf.GetAllCustomersDS();}
6. The postfix DS shows that this method will return a DataSet object.
7. Run the application and you will see that the DataGrid is filled with all the customers.
Note: You can also bind datagrid to customer collection to do this you will just have to change the grid data source to the method that can return collection.DataGrid1.DataSource = cf.GetAllCustomers();
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