Telerik RADGrid – most efficient use

asp.netcontrolsradgridtelerik

Do you typically use the designer or do everything in the ASPX?

Are the resources you've found particularly helpful to come up to speed quickly on how to use this control? I've noticed the intellisense comments for this control are minimal.

I'm continuing to browse the documentation on Telerik's web site, I'm wondering if there are any quicker — "How to bind a dataset and customize the grid using templates in 15 seconds" type of article. Trying to reduce my learning curve for using this control.

Best Answer

We recently started using RADGrid on my team. We have found their LiveExamples to be very informative. The biggest part of easing use of RADGrid is not the grid itself but in how the data is populated. If you simply want to test the layout of the grid initially then you can use any collection that implements IEnumerable (and a couple of others) as the datasource. 

void RadGrid1_NeedDataSource(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    List<Stuff> things = new List<Stuff>();
    /// fill the list
    RadGrid1.DataSource = things;
}

This will let you focus on the presentation of the collection in the grid. I would refer to the LiveExamples included in the installation for a full explanation of these and to see them in action. The LiveExamples are really quite nice.

When it comes time to plug in your data, use an ORM framework (like NHibernate or Linq2SQL) to get collections of objects and bind these collections to the DataSource as above.

You can use plain DataTables and DataSets to bind to the DataSource also, but those are only good for very small applications.

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