RadJumpList for WP7: Part I - Introduction and Simple usage

Download the source code of the example

Last week we released our first beta of the Telerik Windows Phone 7 control toolkit. One of the new controls there is RadJumpList. It is a fundamental control for building data driven WP7 applications. We invested a lot into our data engine story - we have our own internal CollectionViewSource implementation which allows you to sort, filter and group your data with a single line of code (more on the data engine in this in-depth blog post).

Apart from the data engine we also built a high performance ListBox control. RadDataBoundListBox is a virtualized ListBox control which has two major features:

• can display thousands of records (even millions if you got them on the device :)),
• scrolls very smoothly

Now back to RadJumpList. It inherits from RadDataBoundListBox and is adding the group/sort and filter support which is coming from the data engine. Here is how the class diagram looks like:

The important properties here are the Sort/Filter/GroupDescriptors - by using them you are able to control how the data is visualized. In the most common and simple scenario you need to write the following code:

The code above will display the following Grouped and Sorted list of items:

Thats it - now you have your grouped and sorted list of items - with just a couple of lines of code. In the next part of the article I will explain how to dynamical change the sort/filter and group. Download the source code of the example and let us know if you have any feedback on that. 

Part 2 of the series is now available - read it here.