Today I’d like to share a trick that I used quite often in the past few months. Let’s assume that in order to improve the look of your application, you created custom styles for the standard controls:
OK, I’m not a designer… but it will serve the purpose well enough to illustrate my point ;). These styles are very simple, they’re just the default styles of CheckBox and RadioButton in which I only changed the templates to replace the BulletChromes with these awesome blue tick marks.
A few months ago, I wrote a post where I explained how to automatically sort a GridView when a column header is clicked. I had mentioned a possible improvement : add a sort glyph in the column header to show which column is sorted. In today’s post, I present a new version of the GridViewSort class, which displays the sort glyph.
To achieve this result, I used an Adorner : this is a component which allows to draw over existing UI elements, on an independant rendering layer.
It’s quite simple, in WPF, to present data in a grid, thanks to the GridView class. If you want to sort it, however, it gets a little harder… With the DataGridView in Windows Forms, it was “automagic” : when the user clicked a column header, the grid was automatically sorted. To achieve the same behavior in WPF, you need to get your hands dirty… The method recommended by Microsoft is described in this article ; it is based on the Click event of the GridViewColumnHeader class.