Best way to make WPF ListView/GridView sort on column-header clicking?

Question

There are lots of solutions on the internet attempting to fill this seemingly very-basic omission from WPF. I'm really confused as to what would be the "best" way. For example... I want there to be little up/down arrows in the column header to indicate sort direction. There are apparently like 3 different ways to do this, some using code, some using markup, some using markup-plus-code, and all seeming rather like a hack.

Has anyone run into this problem before, and found a solution they are completely happy with? It seems bizarre that such a basic WinForms piece of functionality is missing from WPF and needs to be hacked in.

Answer 1

It all depends really, if you're using the DataGrid from the WPF Toolkit then there is a built in sort, even a multi-column sort which is very useful. Check more out here:

Vincent Sibals Blog

Alternatively, if you're using a different control that doesn't support sorting, i'd recommend the following methods:

Li Gao's Custom Sorting

Followed by:

Li Gao's Faster Sorting

Answer 2

I wrote a set of attached properties to automatically sort a GridView, you can check it out here. It doesn't handle the up/down arrow, but it could easily be added.

<ListView ItemsSource="{Binding Persons}"
          IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem="True"
          util:GridViewSort.AutoSort="True">
    <ListView.View>
        <GridView>
            <GridView.Columns>
                <GridViewColumn Header="Name"
                                DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding Name}"
                                util:GridViewSort.PropertyName="Name"/>
                <GridViewColumn Header="First name"
                                DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding FirstName}"
                                util:GridViewSort.PropertyName="FirstName"/>
                <GridViewColumn Header="Date of birth"
                                DisplayMemberBinding="{Binding DateOfBirth}"
                                util:GridViewSort.PropertyName="DateOfBirth"/>
            </GridView.Columns>
        </GridView>
    </ListView.View>
</ListView>

Answer 3

I am new to WPF. Can u tell me what is this "util" & how to use it? Is "util" inbuilt?

Answer 4

In reply to above question about how to get util to be recognised. Add

xmlns:util="clr-namespace:Wpf.Util"

to the namespace at the top of the xaml document