SandGrid Hierarchies

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Because SandGrid was designed from the ground up to be fully hierarchical in its content, every row supports child rows. This facility for displaying data in a tree is often needed by such applications as newsreaders, for threaded views. Because support is built so deeply into the library, it does not adversely affect the speed of measuring, layout or painting operations, as is the case with competing products.

Nested rows all obey the same schema, that is the main columns in the grid. They are usually indented and have tree lines drawn to show their relationship to each other. Standard expand and collapse buttons are drawn and the usual mouse and keyboard commands work as expected.

SandGrid rows support a ContentsUnknown property for hierarchical data, to be used when it is unknown whether a row contains any children. Upon the first expansion of the row the developer can run code to determine this and populate the row. With other products this is usually achieved by adding a placeholder row as a child of the first, but SandGrid makes this a great deal more elegant. This facility is ideal for Explorer-like applications and is used internally for delayed loading of hierarchical DataViews.

Support for trees of items comes with a useful side effect - the grid can be used as a replacement for the standard TreeView control when set up with a single autosizing column and tree lines and buttons. The advantages to using SandGrid as a replacement for the TreeView are numerous, and include custom sorting (even grouping), custom drawing, different editor types and advanced extensibility.

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