RadGridView's Serialization Made Easy (WinForms)

Hello to all!

My name is Deyan and I am a new member of the Telerik WinForms Team.

In my first blog post I will talk about the RadGridView’s Serialization API and will shortly explain some fundamentals that would help you understand how to utilize it. In case of further interest on this topic, I have prepared a KB article and a demo application to demonstrate different serialization scenarios using the API.

The default serialization settings imply that all visible properties are stored in the XML output. In cases when you want to only store some simple layout settings without paying attention to complex scenarios like grouping or filtering, or if you just want to store the user preferences for column visibility, you can take advantage of the functionality that the RadGridView’s serializer exposes.

The basic idea behind customizing the serializer is filling a collection with metadata objects that exactly describe which grid properties will be stored in the XML output. In this way you can freely choose what will be omitted or added to the serialization output which, to say the least, can considerably change the amount of data that you will have to work with when later deserializing.

In my KB article I have thoroughly described a scenario in which I only persist the widths of the columns in a RadGridView. You can also take a look at the source code of the sample project and play with it in order to better explore this mighty new features.

Any questions are welcome!