RadGrid or GridView Doesn't Match Business Entity for Report

Question

I'm in the process of creating a report in ASP.NET. The business object that I'm retrieving contains all the information I need, but I can't just DataBind() it because the report isn't simply displaying the business entities. I need to arrange the columns in a certain way, do some calculations for each row and manually add columns, plus I need to have a checkbox in each row and those checked rows will be used in a separate chart below.

My question is how to go from the collection of business entities to the report. I was going to either create a new class to store the information the way I need for the report (I would loop through the business entities and transform them into the new structure using the new class). Or I was simply going to use a DataTable to get the information in the right format/order. Is that the correct approach? If not, what's better?

As a side note, how do you manually add rows and columns to a Telerik RadGrid? I'm not interested in DataBind() for the above reasons.

Answer 1

I created a DataTable with the right columns in it. Then I looped through the business entities and transformed what I needed into the DataTable. Then I bound the DataTable to the grid. Worked well.