Advanced Property Grid Control

Advanced Property Grid Control included with DotNetBar for Windows Forms provides you with extensive customization options and great looking Office 2007, 2010 style.

AdvPropertyGrid is designed to help you customize property appearance, editors, property value translation, localization, etc. without modifying the object you assign to the property grid.

In past you had to use inheritance and decorate properties with attributes or implement ICustomTypeDescriptor interface to change how properties appear in property grid. With Advanced Property Grid you can still do that, but we also provide an easy way to customize how properties behave and are displayed without having to extend the objects you assign to the grid.

Property Appearance Customization

Here is screen-shot from sample project included with DotNeBar that shows the property appearance customization in action. Notice the AntiAliasCustomName property which is highlighted in this image:

In image above we created custom style for the property which sets background and text colors, and we also changed the name of the property in the grid from AntiAlias to AntiAliasCustomName, all without modifying the object assigned to the grid.

Property Value Validation

Advanced Property Grid will show tooltip and error icon when property value being set is invalid like shown in screen-shot below:

Events that allow you to translate the textual value to property value and validate it are also provided. If you raise an exception due to invalid value it will be shown in error tooltip.

Property Value Mapping

With AdvPropertyGrid control you can easily re-map property values to any text you want. For example you can change the enumeration member names to user friendly names of your choosing, localize property values etc. In the screen-shot below, take from sample included with DotNetBar, we re-mapped all boolean True, False values to Yes, No:

You can easily re-map only values for single property or for all properties of certain type. Both is demonstrated in the PropertyGrid sample included with DotNetBar.

Property Help

Default settings on AdvPropertyGrid show property help text in SuperTooltip displayed when mouse hovers over the property. You can see this in screen-shot below:

You can also switch this to the help panel that is permanently displayed at the bottom of the control as shown in this image:

By default the help text for property is read from Description attribute on property but you can also specify your own help text instead.

Toolbar Customization

You can add your own custom items to the Advanced Property Grid toolbar that is displayed above the property grid. Following screen-shot from sample included with DotNetBar shows custom "Help Panel" toolbar button added:

Download fully functional trial of DotNetBar for Windows Forms now and experience how easy it is to create professional looking applications.