New Layout View for XtraGrid

Getting rid of detail forms from your projects!

As you know, we have a great WinForms control for representing tabular data called the XtraGrid. It neatly solves various tasks for displaying, editing, and analyzing record-oriented data. Oftentimes though, the issue with displaying tabular data is the tabular layout itself. This format rapidly becomes user-unfriendly when you need to show a large number of columns. Take a look at the following image from the designer:

Even if you manage to get all the columns into the view by setting the ColumnAutoWidth option to false, there is still a comprehension problem with the simultaneous access to all the column at once:

Despite the availability of the AdvancedBandedGrid View, there is still no perfect way to have simultaneous access to all the data for a large record. An end-user can certainly see that data all at the same time but, due to the column headers and cells in a row being displayed across multiple lines, it's not really easy for end-users to find column headers that match specific cells:

Before version 2007.3, simultaneous access to all of the data for a given record could be done by using a Card View or by creating an external detail form for data viewing and editing. Unfortunately these solutions do have their drawbacks: the CardView arranges fields in a single column and doesn't support other layouts; and creating a detail form can be challenging and time-consuming.

With these considerations in mind, we've introduced a new View for the XtraGrid control, LayoutView, which is a straightforward way to display and edit a large number of columns at a time.

There is no longer any need to create external detail forms to edit data since the LayoutView supports numerous field layouts and it's embedded into the XtraGrid control. With the LayoutView, you can easily implement user-friendly interfaces, even if there are dozens of columns in a record:

Records in the LayoutView are represented as cards, but without the limitations of the original CardView. In the image above, for example, the Single Record mode is enabled such that a single card is displayed at a time. In addition to this mode, the LayoutView supports other card layouts: arranging cards in rows, columns, and the fun carousel mode.

Please refer to our online documentation to learn more about the new View: Layout View.

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