At the beginning of September, we shipped Syncfusion’s Essential Studio® Volume 3 with several updates to the SfDataGrid control. All through the release cycle we have been working on numerous improvements in the existing feature sets, and adding new features. The only challenge we had was with our preview tag. This post highlights some of our best new features for our SfDataGrid control that will transform your line-of-business application to a new level.
Nested Grids
Nested grids allow your data to be organized and visualized as a grid within another grid. Records can be expanded or collapsed, giving the end-users ample opportunity to access the desired data, sort, group, and perform all operations in the nested grid columns.
Data Virtualization
Data virtualization provides a smart way to retrieve and load large amounts of data from a source. Data virtualization ensures a smooth and seamless user experience independent of the records count by virtualizing the items in the view that are loaded to the memory.
Context Menu
With this release, we added support for a context menu in the WPF platform. The context menu can contain commands and options related to the content of each cell. Context menu support extends to HeaderRow, Records, Summary Cells, and even the GroupDropArea. For now, context menu support has been added only for the WPF platform.
Cell Types
We have also added support for different cell types (Numeric, Hyperlink, TimeSpan, and DateTime, to name a few) which will assist you in restricting the type of data entered and ensure the input is formatted correctly.
Incremental Data Loading
For applications with a need for strong performance up front, we added support for incremental loading. This conserves resources by loading data contained in the grid’s initial view only, and loading additional records as the user scrolls through the grid.
Validation
The SfDataGrid control now supports a convenient way to validate data before it is committed to the data source. Data can be validated either at the cell or row level. Validation can also be facilitated using Data Annotations, IDataErrorInfo, and INotifyDataErrorInfo (supported in .NET Framework 4.5 and Silverlight 5).
If you are a current customer, we invite you to check our new feature sets in the SfDataGrid control. If you are not a current customer, you can always download our free evaluation and see it in action. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to share them below.