Generic IBindingListView Implementations

Question

Can anyone suggest a good implementation of a generic collection class that implements the IBindingListView & IBindingList interfaces and provides Filtering and Searching capabilities?

I see my current options as:

• Using a class that someone else has written and tested
• Inheriting from BindingList<T>, and implementing the IBindingListView interfaces
• Write a custom collection from scratch, implementing IBindingListView and IBindingList.

Obviously, the first option is my preferred choice.

Answer 1

I used and built upon an implementation I found on and old MSDN forum post from a few years ago, but recently I searched around again and found a sourceforge project called BindingListView. It looks pretty nice, I just haven't pulled it in to replace my hacked version yet.

nuget package: Equin.ApplicationFramework.BindingListView

Example code:

var lst = new List<DemoClass>
{
    new DemoClass { Prop1 = "a", Prop2 = "b", Prop3 = "c" },
    new DemoClass { Prop1 = "a", Prop2 = "e", Prop3 = "f" },
    new DemoClass { Prop1 = "b", Prop2 = "h", Prop3 = "i" },
    new DemoClass { Prop1 = "b", Prop2 = "k", Prop3 = "l" }
};
dataGridView1.DataSource = new BindingListView<DemoClass>(lst);
// you can now sort by clicking the column headings 
//
// to filter the view...
var view = (BindingListView<DemoClass>)dataGridView1.DataSource;            
view.ApplyFilter(dc => dc.Prop1 == "a");

Answer 2

Here is the help for your method 2 and 3 Behind the Scenes: Implementing Filtering for Windows Forms Data Binding

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4af0c96d-61d5-4645-8961-b423318541b4&displaylang=en

Answer 3

A couple of solutions I can think of:

1. The SubSonic Project has a pretty nice implementation of BindlingList<T> which is open source. Although this might require using the entire SubSonic binary to use their implementation.

2. I enjoy using the classes from the Power Collections project. It is fairly simple to inherit from one of the base collections there and implement IBindingListView.