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C#: Custom sort of DataGridView

Asked 2009-01-12T11:34:09.670
21

I need to sort a DataGridView with Natural Sorting (Like in Explorer) so that numbers and text (in the same column) are sorted naturally, and not alphabetically (so that "place 3" comes before "place 20", etc.). I have a DataGridView, where I have set a DataView as DataSource. The DataView contains a DataTable which is created with some values from a database. The column types are string. I have an IComparer, which does what it should, but I can't figure out how to use it, cause I can't find out how to do the sorting. The DataGridView.SortCompare event, which would be perfect, doesn't work since it is databound. The DataView.Sort, only accept strings with column names and sort orders.

Very annoying. Tried to read related issues here on StackOverflow, and searched google lots and lots, but I can't really find much about this. Only stuff I really find is using that Sort(string) method of the dataview, which wont work, since it sorts alphabetically.

Does anyone know how to do this without too much trouble? It got to be others than me struggeling with this? I really don't want to re-implement the whole datagridview or dataview classes, just to get custom sorting...

Update: In case someone were wondering, I'm still looking for a good answer to this problem. Although in the mean time, I ended up creating my own simple table class, and then feed that into a datagridview manually. Overriding the SortCompare method. Bit annoying, but wasn't too hard, since I only need to show values (no editing or anything) and therefore could convert everything to strings.

c# sorting datagridview dataview
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1 Answer

3

This code should work. It is similar to ListView's ListViewItemSorter. Using IComparer.

To use:

private void dgv_ColumnHeaderMouseClick(object sender, DataGridViewCellMouseEventArgs e)
{
    MyDataGridHelper.DataGridSort(dgv, e.ColumnIndex);
}

MyDataGridHelper.cs:

public class MyDataGridHelper
{
    public static void DataGridSort(DataGridView dgv, int column)
    {
        DataGridViewCustomSorter dgvSorter = null;
        if (dgv.Tag == null || !(dgv.Tag is IComparer))
        {
            dgvSorter = new DataGridViewCustomSorter(dgv);
            dgv.Tag = dgvSorter;
        }
        else
        {
            dgvSorter = (DataGridViewCustomSorter)dgv.Tag;
        }
        dgvSorter.SortColumn = column;
        dgv.Sort(dgvSorter);
    }

    private class DataGridViewCustomSorter : IComparer
    {
        private int ColumnIndex;
        private SortOrder OrderOfSort;
        private DataGridView myDataGridView;
        private TypeCode mySortTypeCode;

        public DataGridViewCustomSorter(DataGridView dgv)
        {
            myDataGridView = dgv;
            mySortTypeCode = Type.GetTypeCode(Type.GetType("System.String"));
            ColumnIndex = 0;
            OrderOfSort = SortOrder.None;
        }

        public int Compare(object x, object y)
        {
            int result;
            DataGridViewRow dgvX, dgvY;

            dgvX = (DataGridViewRow)x;
            dgvY = (DataGridViewRow)y;
            string sx = dgvX.Cells[ColumnIndex].Value.ToString();
            string sy = dgvY.Cells[ColumnIndex].Value.ToString();

            //null handling
            if (sx == String.Empty && sy == String.Empty)
                result = 0;
            else if (sx == String.Empty && sy != String.Empty)
                result = -1;
            else if (sx != String.Empty && sy == String.Empty)
                result = 1;
            else
            {
                s
answered 2012-01-03T23:10:02.223

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