Need some advice on putting data into DataGridView in vb.Net - vb.net

Question

I need a little advice in manipulating DataGridView in Visual Basic .Net. This is my first time playing with DataGridView. My program is to load a .txt file containing data of every room in a building and display them in the DataGridView.
Here is a portion of the file showing 2 rooms:
1;1812;1812;F18;T1;26808.16;.00;.00;.00;.00;.00;.00;
1;1813;1813;F18;T1;24000.00;3500.00;.00;300.00;.00;.00;.00
A room is a one-line string that ends with an endline character.
I have no problem with loading the file and getting all these information. I store data of each room into an object of class Room, and put them in a list.
Right now, I put all of the properties of the room into the data grid's columns like this:
Now, how can I put all these rooms' data into the grid? I tried follow http://www.dotnetperls.com/datagridview-vbnet at first, but setting DataSource to a list of class Room imitating from the given link doesn't show anything in the grid view. How can we tell the program to link rows of the grid to a list of objects? Or am I doing it wrong?
So any advise is appreciated. How do we do this?

Answer 1

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how easy this is to do with BindingSources and Visual Studio.
Create your Room Class (already done I presume)
Build your project
Set your Class as your DGV's DataSource:
Click the DGV's smart tag (or the DataSource field in the DGV's property sheet) and on the 'Choose Data Source' pulldown select 'Add Project Data Source...'
On the 'Data Source Config Wizard' select Object and click Next
Navigate your assembly's class structure to select the Class you created in step 1 and click Next
Click Finish to close the Wizard
You'll notice that a new BindingSource has been added to your project. You'll use this BindingSource to bind your List of Room objects to your DGV. Your code will look something like this after you fill your List of Rooms:
roomBindingSource.DataSource = roomList
Note that you'll start with a DataGridView with no columns. After you follow the steps above your DGV will be populated with columns based on the accessibility of the fields in the class you're binding to. At this point you can customize the appearance of the columns such as including removing/adding, etc.

Answer 2

Your problem is that you are using the designer to create your columns and then not linking the DataSource properties to these columns.
The link you posted is talking about automatically generating columns based upon the DataSource which is a list of objects, in that link they do not create the columns in the designer, but instead rely upon the AutoGenerateColumns property being set to true for the DataGridView.
There is a forum post here which talks about what you need to do. It is also described quite well on MSDN.
Basically you need to set the DataPropertyName for each column to match the desired property from your object.
So if your object looks like:
class Room
{
public string RoomName() {get; set;}
}
You need to set the DataPropertyName property to RoomName for the room name column in the grid designer.

Answer 3

Public Class Form1
Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
' Uses Test class from above.
Dim list = New List(Of Test)
list.Add(New Test("Mac", 2200))
list.Add(New Test("PC", 1100))
DataGridView1.DataSource = list
End Sub
Private Sub DataGridView1_SelectionChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _
Handles DataGridView1.SelectionChanged
' Get the current cell location.
Dim y As Integer = DataGridView1.CurrentCellAddress.Y
Dim x As Integer = DataGridView1.CurrentCellAddress.X
' Write coordinates to console.
Console.WriteLine(y.ToString + " " + x.ToString)
End Sub
End Class