.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Type Conversion

The PropertyGrid is able to edit many different kinds of data, and can provide special-purpose user interfaces for certain types. For example, the CustomerDetails class shown earlier has a DateTime or Date field, and the PropertyGrid can display a date picker control when you edit this control. It supports all the built-in types, and all the types used on common properties on controls. It is also possible to extend its capabilities so that it can edit new types.

The PropertyGrid turns out not to have a long list of types that it knows how to display and edit. The control itself knows nothing about, say, the DateTime or Color types, and yet it is still able to present them for editing. This is because it has a very flexible open architecture that allows any type to make itself editable.

A type can provide various levels of support for the PropertyGrid, even going as far as supplying a special-purpose user interface for editing that type (like the pickers that appear for Color and ContentAlignment). We will see how to do that later, but for many types, simple text editing will suffice. So at the bare minimum, our type must support conversion to and from text—its value will be converted to text when it is first displayed in the grid. If the user changes that text, the new string must be converted back to an instance of our type for the edit to take effect.

We will now introduce a custom type to the CustomerDetails example and then add support for basic type conversion ...