How to access DataGridView column names safely?

Question

When manipulating DataGridView cells, you typically do:

MyGrid.CurrentRow.Cells["EmployeeFirstName"].Value = "John";

which is all fine and dandy, but as complexity rises, you start worrying about spelling errors, refactoring issues etc.

Historically, I just made the columns public so I could access them directly in the class instance, but I then have to fight the Windows Forms designer which wants to keep them private (supposedly because it's good practice).

My current solution is to have a class called Cols, with a bunch of strings:

public static class Cols
{
    public static string EmployeeFirstName = "EmployeeFirstName";
    ...
}

Which results in this:

MyGrid.CurrentRow.Cells[Cols.EmployeeFirstName].Value = "John";

This gives me some IntelliSense goodness as opposed to waiting for a runtime error. It still seems vaguely hack-ish, though.

Is there an even more convenient way to do this?

Answer 1

You can use index to access your columns as:

MyGrid.CurrentRow.Cells[1].Value = "John";

Answer 2

If you've created your columns at design-time, you can give them sensible names such as employeeFirstNameColumn.

Then you can get to a cell using something like:

MyGrid.CurrentRow.Columns[employeeFirstNameColumn.Name]

or maybe:

MyGrid.CurrentRow.Columns[employeeFirstNameColumn.Index]

If you're generating the columns dynamically (AutoGenerateColumns = true), you'll have column indices based on the column indices of the datasource you're binding too. So you may be able to use a similar trick to derive the index (especially if your datasource is a strongly-typed DataSet).

Answer 3

The only way to prevent run-time problems is to catch the ArgumentException when trying to access a non-existent Cells item. For example:

private void SetCellValue(DataGridViewCellCollection cells, string col, object value)
{
  try
  {
    cells[col].Value = value;
  } 
  catch (Exception ex)
  {
    Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Failed to set cell {0} to {1} Error={2}",col,value,ex.Message));
  }
}

Answer 4

What you can do is this

for (int x = 0;x <tbl.Rows.Count;x++)//iterate through tables
         {
          Dataset.TableNameRow record = tbl[x];
            dataGridView1.Rows.Add();
            dataGridView1[colHandoffDate.Name,x].Value = record.HandoffDate;
          ....

I added the columns manually , so you could find them in intellisense and use their names(this way you don't have to create a class with strings)