Is DataGrid a necessity in WPF?

Question

I have seen a lot of discussions going on and people asking about DataGrid for WPF and complaining about Microsoft for not having one with their WPF framework till date. We know that WPF is a great UI technology and have the Concept of ItemsControl,DataTemplate, etc,etc to make great UX. Even WPF has got a more closely matching control- ListView, which can be easily templated to give better UX than a traditional Datagrid like display. And I would say a readymade DataGrid control will kill or hide a lot of creativity and it surely will decrease the innovations in User Experience field.

So what is your opinion about the need of DataGrid in WPF as a Framework component? If you feel it is necessary then is it just because the world is so used to the DatGrid way of data display for many years?

Some other threads having the discussion about DatGrid are here and here

Link to WPF ToolKit - Latest WPF DatGrid

Answer 1

DataGrids are excellent for displaying large amounts of tabular data bound to a backing store.

But what happened in the WinForms world was that people often used them for everything that required a multi-element scrolling list. Souped-up third-party DataGrids soon became available that allowed columns and fields to contain buttons and ComboBoxes and icons, etc.

The DataGrid became a workhorse because there was a need for something it could be coaxed into behaving like. Similar happened to DataTables before generic collections came along--and when you're using lots of DataTables, presenting it in the UI with a DataGrid is the path of least resistance.

I think that when WPF came out, a lot of programmers like me were still thinking in this fashion, and sought out WPF ports of the DataGrid concept.

Answer 2

Can't think of a better control to display tabular data, especially in business apps where you don't want to reinvent the wheel by templating/developing a (Headered)ItemsControl to make it behave like the good old DGV. I'm sure you saw this.

Answer 3

Yes it is! Among many other controls that ms failed to deliver. (Datepicker, NumericControl)

MS should first give us the tools to get the job done, that is the least i expect from a programming enviroment with the hype of wpf.

Answer 4

After working with WPF for about 2 years now. I would say that a DataGrid is really just a glorified ListBox (since [almost] everything in WPF is styleless).

One could style a ListBox to take an Entity of some sort and show a "record" control for each entry. Depending on how flexible these are made, they could automatically adjust based on the entity passed.

Answer 5

It is essential, but you can achieve nearly the same effect with a ListView that is using a GridView, can't you?

Answer 6

Yes DataGrids will never go away as essential business UI components. People love their spreadsheets and we want to share in that love!

Note that MS are shipping these extra controls - they have created the WPF Toolkit on CodePlex to provide a fast-turnaround, open-source style of deployment.

It already includes a DataGrid and Calendar.

Answer 7

Nobody is disputing that you can make a DataGrid control in WPF yourself. The same can probably be said about WinForms, although it would be more difficult. I've implemented some functionality with ListView - presenting tabular data is easy, you could even say it's well supported. However, the amount of code, manually written code, needed to make an editing ListView is enormous.

The business applications usually require editing of many tables, and you don't want to be creative, you want to be quick. That's why DataGrid is needed in my opinion.

Answer 8

If you want to see what a WPF datagrid can really do, whether with many columns or just one, I suggest you take a look at Xceed (I work for them).

XBAP (no-install) demo of Xceed DataGrid for WPF v4.0

XBAP (no-install) demo of a datagrid disguised as a listbox but with Asynchronous Data Virtualization.