iGrid Control - History of This Project

At some time every Visual Basic developer creates an interface that displays tabular data. Sometimes the data should be editable. Users often want to manipulate these data - to sort and search, to group rows, etc. Also, the rows of data aren't always stored in a database and may contain a lot of graphical information.

If you want to use one of the standard Visual Basic controls in such applications, you will find that neither MSFlexGrid (MSHFlexGrid) nor ListView from MS Common Controls in the report mode can provide you with the functionality described above to the full.

Our company was also confronted with such difficulties, and so we decided to create own grid control that would allow us to implement the tasks described above. We didn't want to create a control that only automates all standard tasks (sort, search, etc, we wanted the developer to have influence on these processes and adjust them exactly the way they need.

In other words, we wanted to create a control that differs from other well-known grids in the same way as VC++ with WinAPI differs from pure VB. If you want to solve a common task such as browsing, sorting and grouping a database table or SQL query without any additional coding, such grids as XpressQuantumGrid or TrueDBGrid are very suitable for you. But if you want to create a tabular user interface with non-standard or customizable functionality, you face difficulties because you cannot interfere in the internal processes.

We started to search for source codes that can help us to implement our needs. We found an excellent website with source codes - vbAccelerator. vbAccelerator's source codes and binaries are provided for your reuse in any of your projects, whether proprietary, commercial or open-source (read vbAccelerator Usage Policy).

One of the components of this site was SGrid, but originally this control could only display but not edit data. We wanted to implement an editable control and include widespread built-in editors like singleline and multiline textboxes, comboboxes with icons and checkboxes into it. Moreover, these editors must be integrated with the displayed data, and the developer must get a standard set of events which work identically for all built-in editors.

As a result, we created the iGrid ActiveX Control which is widely used in our applications for local customers and in the applications of other developers. We have been working on this component since 2000, and are continuing to enhance its functionality today. It required many years to fix all the bugs in the unsupported SGrid, incorporate the built-in editors, optimize it so it works much faster, and also add many big and small useful features which make the life of the developer easier.

Read the following page to find out more about the main improvements we made in iGrid in comparison with SGrid:

The difference between iGrid and its predecessor, SGrid »