New Filtering Menu for RadGrid for ASP.NET AJAX

Hi everyone,

As of Q1 2010 RadGrid will be equipped with a new filtering menu – a powerful and flexible feature the interest in which was sparked by RadGrid’s MVC counterpart offered by Telerik. It will be a sub-part of RadGrid's header context menu and will allow for filtering the grid's data on two conditions related with a logical AND operator:

Perhaps, many of you are already eager to know how the new feature should be switched on/off. For this purpose a new property has been introduced into the RadGrid control -RadGrid.EnableHeaderContextFilterMenu/GridTableView.EnableHeaderContextFilterMenu. In addition, it is important that RadGrid.EnableHeaderContextMenu/ GridTableView.EnableHeaderContextMenu and RadGrid.AllowFilteringByColumn/GridTableView.AllowFilteringByColumn properties be set to true in order for the header context filter menu to be available.

For the purpose of supporting this extension to RadGrid's filtering mechanism, each GridColumn will feature an additional current filter function/value properties that are set to contain the second filter condition data. These properties are called AndCurrentFilterFunction/AndCurrentFilterValue:

In spite of having been created to allow for filtering the grid on two conditions, the new menu will give the freedom to set only one of those. The condition for which no data has been set will be ignored and RadGrid will filter its data only on the one for which a filter function and a filter value have been set.

When a filter command is triggered from the header context filter menu, RadGrid will construct a command argument object represented by a Triplet:

• the first object will contain the column's unique name on which the filter command has been fired.
• the second will be a Pair object including the first filter condition filter function and filter value.
• the third one will also constitute a Pair object containing the second filter condition filter function and filter value. 

After the ItemCommand event of the grid is raised, the command argument object constructed as described above will be sent into the event handlers attached to the event. The name of the new filter command is HeaderContextMenuFilterCommand.

The header context filter menu will consist of:

• a "ClearFilter" button that resets the filtering on the given column
• two RadComboBox controls containing the filter function options
• two RadTextBox's or another type of special controls for setting the filter values.

and will be represented by a single object server-side. This way of implementation has been chosen to speed up the grid performance by merely creating one menu instance server side and then, based on the type of the column over which it is displayed, show the required filter functions and filter value controls. The presence in the grid of special columns such as GridDateTimeColumn, GridMaskedColumn etc. will make the header context filter menu create corresponding controls for extra convenience in specifying the filter values (such as RadDatePicker, RadMaskedBox, etc.). For greater optimization only two instances of each specific type of control are created server-side and then used for all columns that require them. Therefore, if the grid has five numeric columns only two instances of a RadNumericBox control will be created and then used by all numeric columns. Still the filtering menu remains independent for each column - this means that the filtering menu options vary by the column's DataType and the properties of the special controls will depend on any other specific column properties such as Mask, DecimalDegits, PickerType etc. 

The new filter menu can be used along-side the classic one. In this case, the GridTableView.IsFilterItemExpanded property should be set to true (the default value). When the two filter menus are switched on simultaneously, the data set for the first filter condition of the header context filter menu will be also set as filter data for the classic one and vice versa. Thus, if you choose the EqualTo filter option from the first combo in the header context filter menu and specify "Bulgaria" as a filter value, then the filter function of the classic menu on the same column will automatically be set to EqualTo and the filter box will be populated with "Bulgaria" as a filter value. If you want to use just the header context filter menu, then just set GridTableView.IsFilterItemExpanded property to false leaving, as mentioned above, the RadGrid.GridTableView/GridTableView.AllowFilteringByColumn property to true.

There is no other more valuable feature, a grid control may possess, than its filtering capabilities. Improving those means placing  more and more power at the hands of developers and end-users. And that’s exactly what we have tried to deliver with the introduction of RadGrid’s header context filter menu. So, stand by the Q1 release is just around the corner.