A helpful code sample for binding a collection to a datagrid

Question

Hello there I am building an application and I have a client class which returns a COLLECTION of client objects. Each Client object has 6 string properties. What I want to do is bind this collection of client objects to a datagrid. I have found loads of info on this but I cant seem to get it to work. Has anyone got some sample code that I could look at as it is so simple but I am missing something. note: My collection is working ie... it is returning the collection of client objects. thanks Russ

chrishornberger · Answer

You can't bind directly to the array or the array list and have it work the way you expect. What the binding does is dig into the array and attempt to reflect the contained object and bind to all the public properties. Value types don't expose properties so the binding kind runs home to mommy and binds on the least common denominator... the count property on the array (.Length). What you need to do is propogate your array(list) with objects that expose public properties. The properties become the column names in the grid. Here's an example. First here's a container object I came up with for testing: using System; namespace TestHarness{ public class StringContainer{ private string txt = ; private string pID = ; public StringContainer( string val ) { txt = val; pID = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); } public string Value{ get{ return txt; } } public string ID{ get{ return pID; } } } } Then the code to build an array of StringContainer objects: private StringContainer[] SimpleTest(){ ArrayList ar = new ArrayList(); for( int x=0; x<100; x++ ){ ar.Add( Some Value  + x.ToString() ); } StringContainer[] vals = new StringContainer[ ar.Count ]; for( int x=0; x<vals.Length; x++ ){ vals[x] = new StringContainer( ar[x].ToString() ); } return vals; } Then here's the relevant code to do the binding: StringContainer[] vals = SimpleTest(); this.dataGrid1.DataSource = vals;