Martin Vassilev's blog

Host Telerik’s WPF Gauges and Charts in RadGridView for WinForms

Martin Vassilev — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:06:02 GMT

Did you have a chance to try the beta versions of Telerik's WPF gauges and charts ? Yes? And you like them, but already have a big and complex WinForms project and you have no plans to upgrade it to the new amazing WPF technology soon?

Do not worry; you can get the best of both worlds and use the WPF goodies in your WinForms application thanks to the ElementHost control that resides in the namespace System.Windows.Forms.Integration. You could find more info on this topic in the following MSDN article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms745781.aspx

Following this concept, I have prepared a WinForms application with Telerik's WPF gauges and charts. It consists of a hierarchical RadGridView with custom cells, which host our WPF controls, and are added to the grid in its CreateCell event.

You can find the project files here. It uses the latest beta's versions of WinForms Q3 2008 and WPF controls assemblies. We will demonstrate the applicaon at PDC 2008 and all of you that will visit the Telerik's booth can expirience it. After the Q3 release we will include this application in Telerik's Code Library and you can use it with all of new amaizing versions of Telerik Controls.

You could download current versions of RadControls for WinForms and RadControls for WPF Futures through your Client.NET account.

Enjoy!

Build a slideshow with RadChart and RadRotator for WinForms in minutes

Martin Vassilev — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:00:09 GMT

Last week we got an interesting request from a customer of ours - he wanted to add several RadCharts in the RadRotator control and to implement custom slideshow. The idea was so appealing that I decided to shoot a quick blog about it. We already have similar image slideshows and I must say it is a pretty cool way to give your WinForms app a modern style and appeal:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/submission/b311D-bdhadm.aspx

Even though it is very easy to add RadChart directly to the rotator (by using RadHostItem), RadRotator performs much better with images and/or other windowless RadItems. This is why the more suitable approach here would be to convert the charts into images and then to add these in the rotator wrapped in RadImageItems. This way the slideshow can also take advantage of the slide animation features of the RadRotator control.

So, you have the charts in place. Here is the code that would create the images and insert them in the rotator:

RadChart myChart = ChartCreator.Create(i); //create charts
myChart.Size = this.radRotator1.Size;
Image chartAsImage = myChart.GetBitmap();
RadImageItem imageItem = new RadImageItem();
imageItem.Image = chartAsImage;
this.radRotator1.Items.Add(imageItem);

Easy and cool! Here are some screenshots of the sample app:

Download the application from here.

I hope this is good food for thoughts on the impressive features that you can add to your apps using RadControls for WinForms.

Let us know if you have interesting ideas on how we can improve the UI of your application. We can surely cook something up for you J

Export and Printing RadGridView using Telerik Reporting

Martin Vassilev — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:05:45 GMT

Hi everyone, by means of introduction my name is Martin Vassilev and I am a support officer with the Windows Forms team here at Telerik. As of late, we noticed increased interest towards RadGridView data export capabilities.

What we have always told our customers is that the RadGridView will have only basic Microsoft Excel export capability, until we are able to implement a commercial grade format converter here at Telerik. However, that requires quite some time, and customers can't wait right? What was needed was a quick, easy, stable way of exporting RadGridView content to formats such as RTF, PDF and XLS. We also wanted to leverage an existing technology, rather than start from scratch. Well - guess what: the answer turned out to be right next door (quite literally too) - Telerik Reporting.

For one, it already offers all the exporting capabilities we need, and also delivers a fine-grained and professional printing mechanism, with print preview capability and numerous adjustments options.

We have prepared a classhelper library that can be used to interface the RadGridView component with Telerik Reporting. Using the helpers allows the generation of flat (no hierarchy support at this moment) grids with or without grouping into a report that can easily be printed or exported to a number of formats.

What's really neat is that when you create reports from RadGridView, most of its visual settings such as column widths, header colors, text alignments and font formatting are transferred to the report.

So, how do you use the RadGridReporting class and start creating your own reports based on RadGridView? Just add a copy of RadGridReportinLite.dll and add a reference to it in your project. To benefit from this functionality , you need to have installed both Telerik RadControls for Windows Forms and Telerik Reporting products. After that, you will be able to create an instance of ReportForm and set various options such as:

Property	Description
RadGridReport.FitToPageSize	Fit column sizes to printing page
RadGridReport.UseGridColors	Use grid header colors(mixed from gradients)
RadGridReport.AllMargins	Set all page margins in milimeters
RadGridReport.PaperKind	Choose report paper kind format (A4, A3 etc.)
RadGridReport.PageLandScape	Choose lanscape or portrait view
RadGridReport.RepeatTableHeader	Choose to repeate table header on every page
RadGridReport.ReportWindowState	Windows state of report form
RadGridReport.ReportSize	Size of report form (if not maximized)

To generate the report, you need to call the ReportFormShow method and pass your RadGridView instance as a second parameter.

I have prepared a small Example application to illustrate the approach. It is available in our code library section.

I encourage you to experiment with it, and to add export and printing capability to your application. Please keep the feedback coming, and share with us how you would like to see this functionality extended in the future.