List View

In this video we are going to see how to use a list view control in a Windows Forms application using Visual Studio 2010

Before we start, I assume you already have a Visual Studio 2010 installed in a machine

So open fire up your Visual Studio 2010 and create a Windows Forms application

Once your application is created, now you simply go to Toolbox and drag and drop a List View control from Toolbox onto the form

form. After control is added to the form you can resize it, relocate it

it, wherever you want to move it. And then next thing we are going to do is create a

set its properties. Right click on the control and hit properties. As you can see, the

properties window pops up here. First thing I'm going to do is change the name. I'm going to change the name. I'm going to change

name to author's list view now list view is no different than any other

controls available in Windows forms except it has some extra features if one

other thing I want to mention before we go further if you are just looking for

a control that just lists some items and you can sort them and move around

select them I would recommend you go to list box control do not use list view

control. This view control is much more complex and it's more useful when you're

trying to display complex items such as you know some items may have images

some items may have different views, the same items can also be you know

different they may have different images then you can also probably say group

those items based on different categories and things like that so what I

would recommend if you just need a simple listing or item to be listed in a control

I suggest you go back to your list box control and try to use that So let get back to our list view control So as you can see from properties we can set all the properties from here

You can, you know, set border style. You can set any other properties from here

And you can also set context menu columns. If you want to add multiple columns, you can also do that

So as soon as you click on columns, you will see column header collection

editor pops up here you can say add different columns where name of the headroom

is column header one I'm going to change that to name header if you look at

here the column header also has a text you can change the text to say name or say

author name and you can align it obviously with add another say all right so we add three

all right so we added three columns now now let's go back to items property

items property actually adds items to a list view control now there can be

different ways you can add items so first before we go to go into more

details let's just add few items in first we are going to add simple tax items

simple strings so if you click on items you will see list view collection

list view item collection editor appears so add as soon as you add you'll see list view item

is added where a list view item can have its own properties can have its own background

color it can have its own font everything it can have whatever you want In text say you can have tool tip for text you can also assign some groups images which I going to discuss later

Add one more item, say... Actually add a few more items

I'm going to add these few more items to the Obviously you can remove items using remove button

Okay, so as you can see, we added five items to the list view control here

one thing you may notice here is all these items are all in one row

but since it's just a string so I would rather have them listed in a list box

list box item so here's the main difference between list box and list view

a list view can be used to provide multiple views of the same data same item so if you look at the view property this is very

important property of list view that makes a control list view not a list box

So, as you can see by default, large icon property is set as a view

So if you look at click on this little icon you will see it has one two three four five it has five different views so it can be tile which entire you will see the view changes if

you go to list so as soon as I change my view to list as you can see all

items are displayed in a list in a list manner so actually I can even change the

size of column and do everything else I can select anything I want so I'm going

to discuss all these different views in my next video I don't want to make this video like a two hours video so so in

this so let's add a few more change few more properties and then we are almost

done with this so multi select is true already show groups is true scrollable

is true show tool tips I'll say true

Alright Can label Edit labels

Can change header style what kind of header you want a clickable header

None click no header at all Say yes Grid lines you can show grid lines true

This is important when you will have multiple columns and multiple rows

Full row select true so these are all general properties you will see one more thing you can do is

dark dog property if you say fill is going to fill in the whole form so let's

hit F5 which will build and run this sample what you will see is a list box

kind of looking list you control where you can select items and you can also see

tool tip if you notice so This is it for this part one of Listview tutorials

I'm going to discuss more functionalities and properties and methods available in Listview Control in my next videos