Edit the display name of enumeration members in a PropertyGrid

I have a property grid that I am using for users to be able to configure objects for any plugin that is written to be used in my application. I would like to be able to tell developers writing plugins to use the ComponentModel Attributes for their members like so:

[CategoryAttribute("On Screen Display Settings"),
 DescriptionAttribute("Whether or not to show the session timer."),
 DisplayName("Show Session Timer")]
 public bool ShowTimer
 {
    get;
    set;
 }

This works great. Now I would like for the members of an enumeration to be able to be edited as well. i.e.

public enum Resolution_ : byte
{
    DCIF,
    CIF,
    QCIF,
    [DisplayName("4CIF")]
    CIF4,
    [DisplayName("2CIF")]
    CIF2
}

So that they are displayed in the PropertyGrid's list like so:

 DCIF
 CIF
 QCIF
 CIF4
 CIF2

Along with any Descriptions and Display names they may have with them.

It seems that I can only do this with properties, events, and methods. Does anyone know how I can do this for an enumeration?

c# .net winforms propertygrid

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1 Answer

You can attach a custom TypeConverter implementation to the property whose type is your enumeration and override the GetStandardValuesSupported and GetStandardValues to return a custom list of items to show in the drop-down list in the PropertyGrid. You can then override ConvertFrom/ConvertTo methods to handle converting values to/from your enumeration type.

You may also want to override GetStandardValuesExclusive and have it return "true" so the user can't type anything into the property value.

So, something like this:

public class MyTypeConverter : TypeConverter
{
  //Override GetStandardValuesExclusive, 
  //GetStandardValues and GetStandardValuesSupported
}

public class SomeClass
{
   [TypeConverter(typeof(MyTypeConverter))]
   public Resolution SomePropertry
   {
      ...
   }
}

In your implementation of GetStandardValues/ConvertFrom/ConvertTo you could then use Reflection to pull out the DisplayNameAttribute (or DescriptionAttribute, which may be more suited to this task) attributes of the various enum members to show that text instead of hard-coding the list of items to show.

answered 2011-09-14T20:55:01.120

Edit the display name of enumeration members in a PropertyGrid

1 Answer

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