As you probably know, the standard way to select or deselect an item in a WinRT list control is to slide it up or down a little. Although I rather like this gesture, it’s not very intuitive for users unfamiliar with Modern UI. And it gets even more confusing, because my previous statement wasn’t perfectly accurate: in fact, you have to slide the item perpendicularly to the panning direction. In a GridView, which (by default) pans horizontally, that means up or down; but in a ListView, which pans vertically, you have to slide the item left or right.
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.