iGrid Control

In a nutshell, iGrid is a symbiosis of FlexGrid and ListView in report mode. It allows you to edit its cells and provides you with a wide range of features for manipulating them. It also emulates the Outlook messages list and supports virtual mode when it requests new rows whenever they need to be displayed (this is especially useful if you work with remote databases).

iGrid is implemented as an ActiveX control, and makes wide use of COM data types. The most suitable development environments for using iGrid are Visual Basic 5/6 and VBA with UserForms (Visual Basic for Application) built into MS Office 97/200/XP/2003. Theoretically, it can be used in any development environment which supports ActiveX controls. Please click here to find out more.

The highly optimized flicker-free display code makes this grid draw faster than FlexGrid and other VB grids, whilst at the same time allowing more sophisticated displays to be set up. iGrid implements many useful features - multicolumn sorting with numerated sort icons, custom draw cells, saving and restoring of its layout, own Memory Manager. The iGrid constituent parts (column headers, cell editors, scroll bars) can use Windows XP Visual Styles.

Each cell of iGrid can be formatted individually (even in the same column). To format cells, developers can use format strings, different fonts and colors, format flags (horizontal and vertical alignment, an ellipsis at the end or at the middle of the cell text to fit the text into the cell, etc), and a hatched background. Along with the standard features for grid controls (multiselection mode, row mode, OLE Drag-n-drop support), iGrid gives you fast access to rows and columns by string keys, and a wide sort criteria range (you can sort by cell text disregarding the character case, cell icon or extra icon, selection, cell text indentation, cell foreground or background color, or even using your own sort criteria). The iGrid header can also be adjusted to you needs; you can change its font, background and foreground colors for the entire header or particular column headers, and display multi-line column titles.

One of the distinctive features of iGrid, is the ability to edit its cells using standard in-place editors (textboxes, comboboxes and checkboxes using a wide range of formatting options - single-line and multi-line textboxes, automatic adjustment of the dropdown width and height of comboboxes, checkboxes with two and three states, etc).

The iGrid event model can help you to control and adjust practically each aspect of the grid. You can finely tune the editing process, and validate the data entered using the RequestEdit, BeforeCommitEdit, AfterCommitEdit and CancelEdit events; the scroll bars fire their own set of events; cells also raise useful set of events (CellSelectionChange, MouseEnter and MouseLeave). The iGrid header allows you to control dragging and resizing of its items, raises the ColHeaderMouseEnter and ColHeaderMouseLeave events, which you can use to implement column header tooltips, and the HeaderRightClick event, which is useful to display a context menu for column headers.

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