Windows Data Binding

So far, the examples have concentrated on a single control designed specifically for data binding: the Windows DataGrid. But the Windows Forms platform also supports data binding with just about any control (as demonstrated a little later in this section) and automatically synchronizes multiple data-bound controls. This ability goes far beyond just ADO.NET and the DataSet. In fact, the ability to bind a data object to a Windows control depends on the small set of interfaces shown in Table 12-4.

Table 12-4. Data binding interfaces

Interface

Description

IList

Allows simple data binding to a collection of objects of the same type. For example, you can data bind to an ArrayList that contains only one type of object because it implements this interface.

IBindingList

Provides additional features for notification. This notification includes when the list itself changes (for example, the number of items in the list increases) and when the list items change (for example, the third item in a list of customers has a change to its FirstName field). This interface is implemented by DataView and DataViewManager.

IEditableObject

Provides support for editing. In other words, when the user modifies the control, the changes are applied to the data object. This is implemented by the DataRowView class.

IDataErrorInfo

Allows a data object to offer error information a control can bind to. This information consists of two strings: the Error property, which returns general ...

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