.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Name

Binding

Synopsis

This class is used in the data-binding framework to bind a property on an object to a property on a Control (e.g., the Name property of a business object to the Text property on a Control). This process is called simple binding.

A bag of these bindings are held by a BindingManagerBase that manages a set of related bindings. The binding manager makes sure the current value in the data source is reflected in each Binding it contains.

Finally, a bag of binding managers is called a BindingContext. The BindingContext is associated with a particular control and contains all the binding managers for all the controls owned by that container.

The Binding is created by specifying the name of the Control property to which you are binding (e.g., “Text”), the object that is going to provide the data (e.g., a hypothetical Employee business object), and a string that determines the property to be used on the data source (e.g., the Employee object Name). This final parameter can be an empty string to bind to the value of the object itself, the name of a property on the object, or a dot-separated path navigating to the appropriate property (e.g., through the tables and relations of a System.Data.DataSet). These are subsequently obtained through the Control, DataSource, and PropertyName properties of the Binding class.

When the Binding is created, it automatically finds a binding manager for the data source in the Control objects BindingContext and adds itself. You can find this binding ...