How to Perform Binding with DataGridView in WinForms

The DataGridView control provides a powerful and easiest way to display our data in tabular format with entity framework 5. We can use DataGridView as we want to, like we can use it to simply show our read-only data or we can use it with editable views of our data, in c# programming. Access data from the database and perform binding steps to show them in datagridview.

To do binding on DataGridView with our data is straight-forward and in many cases it is as simple as setting the DataSource property of DataGridView. As DataGridView supports standard binding model, so it will bind to some instances of c# classes like DataSet, DataTable, BindingList and BindingSource etc.

The first way to bind our datagridview to table of database is:

studentDataGridView.DataSource = "DataSet Name";

studentDataGridView.DataMember = "Table Name";

Let’s suppose we have a c# class Student having some properties like following:

public class Student
{
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public string RollNo { get; set; }
public string Branch { get; set; }
}

Now we will bind datagridview to list of students as:

DataContext dc = new DataContext();
var studentList = dc.Student;
studentDataGridView.DataSource = studentList.ToList();

Here ToList() method is used to convert our DbSet<Student> type of data to List<Student> type of data, because DbSet<> type of data cant be directly bind with any control.

Now if we want to bind only Name and Branch column of Student class then:

DataContext dc = new DataContext();
var studentList = from d in dc.Student
select new
{
d.Name,
d.Branch
};
studentDataGridView.DataSource = studentList.ToList();

We can bind our desired columns to datagridview as we have done in above code. DataGridView doesn’t have any mean where is data come from, so we can use conditions in our queries also.

See Also: DataGridView binding with DataSet