Infragistics Community

Setting GroupByRecordPresenter's Background

[Infragistics] Alex Fidanov — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:28:00 GMT

Why is not the background of the GroupByRecordPresenter now changing when I set its Background property?

This is because the Background of the Record Content Site (where the description is) of the GroupByRecordPresenter is bound to the current theme's LabelBackground brush with the following binding : Background="{DynamicResource {ComponentResourceKey {x:Type igDP:XamDataGrid}, LabelBackground}}". Only the area underneath the record selector is bound to the Background property of the GroupByRecordPresenter.

Default

If the theme changes, the Background of the Record content site will change accordingly:

Theme

However, if you do not want to use a theme, but you want to be able to change the Background of the GroupByRecordPresenter the same way the Theme changes it, you have to retemplate it and change the binding expression that the GroupByRecordPresenter is using for the background color:

Custom

The full style for the GroupByRecordPresenter you can find in the project attached to this blog post.

Please note that this samples uses volume 9.2 The GroupByRecordPresenter style for older versions, for example volume 9.1, is different and will have to be taken from the DefaultStyles directory (~\Program Files (x86)\Infragistics\NetAdvantage for .NET 2009.1\WPF\DefaultStyles).

AJAX Compression in 2010.1

[Infragistics] Murtaza Abdeali — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:45:00 GMT

Last week, Jason Beres put up an extensive road map of all the Products Infragistics will be shipping in the next couple of months. As you can see, these releases are going to be packed with all sorts of goodies. One of them is the new AJAX Compression module in ASP.NET’s 10.1 release. This new feature will compress Ajax responses generated by the server when using any of our Aikido-based controls. The browser will then de-compress the response on the client and process it further. When you turn on this feature, you immediately get the following benefits.

Bandwidth Savings: When a response is GZIPed, the bandwidth used by the Ajax response will decrease automatically. Your bandwidth capacity will improve and you will be able to serve more users at any given time, without clogging the network. If you are using a hosting provider that charges based on the amount of data transfer, you will now have less usage on the bandwidth, hence saving you money.
Time Savings: When the response size goes down, the round trip of an Ajax request from the server goes down with it. Based on how far the server is from the client machine on the network, the Ajax response time to the client will decrease by that much because the response is compressed and is faster to reach its destination. This will make your end-users a bit happier and productive :).

To get a better understanding of this feature, let’s take a look at a very simple example. I have a WebDataGrid bound to the Invoices view(26 Columns X 2155 Rows) in NorthWind using SQLDataSource that has paging enabled. I am going to set up different page sizes in the WebDataGrid to monitor the round trip times as well the response sizes with and without Ajax compression. I am using FireFox 3.6 and FireBug to monitor the results. Also, my server is the same machine as the client.

Without Compression
WebDataGrid Page Size	Response Size (KB)	Round Trip Time (Secs)
20	50.6	1.18
50	81.1	1.14
100	140.9	1.23
200	261.8	1.4
500	627.7	2.13
1000	1228.8	4.32

With Compression
WebDataGrid Page Size	Response Size (KB)	Round Trip Time (Secs)
20	7.4	1.19
50	10.2	1.19
100	15.8	1.19
200	27.4	1.29
500	62.5	1.51
1000	121	2.12

If you chart the data above in a line chart showing the two different data series, you can clearly see the benefits you get when using the Ajax compression feature.

Ok, so now it is time to answer the million dollar question. What do I need to do to get all these performance gains? It is very simple, all you have to do is add the following HTTP module under your web.config section and now all the Ajax responses of the Aikido-based controls on your site will be compressed and you will get the benefits mentioned above.

...

</httpModules>

Just make sure your assembly version matches with the install version & build.

Silverlight 4 with Jeff Prosise, WebDataGrid CRUD & Validation

craigshoemaker — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:55:00 GMT

Here are the media items I posted this week. I hope you enjoy!

	Silverlight 4 with Jeff Prosise Jeff Prosise joins the show to discuss the details surrounding the new LOB features of Silverlight 4 beta.
	WebDataGrid Validation Learn how to include client-side validators in the WebDataGrid during CRUD operations. See how to use stock ASP.NET validation controls as well as working with custom validators. Finally, learn to customize the validation message with a custom style. Watch the video Read the article
	WebDataGrid AutoCRUD Learn how the WebDataGrid supports AutoCRUD. The AutoCRUD feature is the default behavior of the grid to interface with an ASP.NET data source control to manage all the select, insert, update and delete messages of the grid. This demo uses the ObjectDataSource, but the approach is the same for any other supported data source.
	WebDataGrid Manual CRUD Learn to implement CRUD operations by handling the WebDataGrid CRUD events manually. See how you can take explicit control of the select, insert, update and delete messages to implement your own data access logic.

Telling a Good Story with Interactive Line Charts

Amy Quinn — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:31:00 GMT

The New York Times does a great job using interactive graphics to tell a story. Recently the New York Times reported on the details of the United States 2011 budget proposal and how the projected budget deficits may affect US policies and power in the upcoming years. As part of this article, web designers created an interactive line chart that shows how US budget forecasts match up with reality. This animated line chart is a great example of how interactive graphs can tell a story that words alone cannot tell.

The first view of the line chart gives a snapshot of the past budget and budget forecasts. Tooltips provide detailed information about individual data points on the chart.

Additional steps in the chart animate and illustrate how budget projections are often incorrect regarding deficits and surpluses. The user is invited to examine individual years through using the slider below the chart.

The later steps in the chart outline possible reasons for inaccurate budget projections, such as changing assumptions about the unemployment rate and the overall health of the US economy.

As you can see, these interactive line charts tell the story of budget forecasts very well. They clearly illustrate a history of inaccurate budget projections and possible reasons behind these errors. In addition, the interactivity and animation found in these graphics engage and entertain the reader.

I hope you are inspired by the great work the folks at the New York Times is doing as I am. I recommend you explore their website to see what else they have produced.

Q1/Q2 Release Schedule + Roadmap

Jason Beres — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:41:00 GMT

I have gotten a bunch of emails in the last few weeks about what the roadmap looks like for 2010 so I want to use this opportunity to let you know what is going on and what to expect.

We had originally planned to ship a Visual Studio 2010 feature complete product in March, but with the delay of Visual Studio 2010 to sometime in April, we don’t want to wait to ship. So we are going to do a special ship date after the RTM of Visual Studio 2010 in May and call it 2010 Volume 2. This allows us to deliver features on CLR 4 in ASP.NET based on the release bits, and not hold on to them until later in the year. We’ll still have the usual Q4 release, which will be called 2010 Volume 3, so this year you’ll end up getting 3 releases of the line of business controls with your subscription.

Though there are a myriad of exciting reasons to move to Visual Studio 2010 and CLR 4, there are two big ones that are going to improve what we can deliver to you this year and beyond:

ASP.NET Client Templates (or Client Binding) in ASP.NET Ajax Library – this gives us a client side data access and data binding story that is more in line with the architectures that you have built your Web Forms applications on over the years. You get the RAD WYSIWYG features of the Visual Studio designer, as well as the flexibility of a client-side, full AJAX story on working with data.
CLR 4 Silverlight-WPF Compatibility – With Silverlight 4 and WPF having assembly portability, and with key XAML styling features working across Silverlight and WPF, we can synchronize the code bases without losing functionality in one platform or the other. This means you get more controls on both platforms, and the XAML and API’s in the controls we will the same or similar to take advantage of specific platform features.

With that in mind, here is the release schedule for 2010. Below this table is a detailed list of controls and features slated per release.

Date	Products	Version	Notes
15-Mar-2010	Windows Forms WPF Silverlight ASP.NET	2010 Volume 1	Continued support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
15-Mar-2010	WPF Data Visualization CTP	CTP	First public CTP of our WPF Data Visualization product Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
10-May-2010	Windows Forms WPF Silverlight ASP.NET	2010 Volume 2	Visual Studio 2010 RTM fully regression tested and supported with CLR 4 Features
10-May-2010	Silverlight Data Visualization	2010 Volume 1
10-May-2010	Silverlight & WPF	CTP	New Scheduling framework and controls that will ship in the fall of 2010 for Silverlight and WPF.
07-Jun-2010	WPF Data Visualization	2010 Volume 1	Targeting CLR 4
04-Oct-2010	Windows Forms WPF Silverlight ASP.NET	2010 Volume 3	Our usual Q4 release of new controls, components and features for the line of business controls
04-Oct-2010	Silverlight Data Visualization WPF Data Visualization	2010 Volume 2	CLR 4, Silverlight 4 Support (based on availability of Silverlight 4 RTM bits)
TBD	Silverlight (Web Client) Silverlight (Data Visualization)		We will ship Silverlight 4 compatible builds when Microsoft RTM’s Silverlight 4

Now that you have an idea of the release dates, let’s look at the feature forecast for the releases this year. Barring any quality issues, we plan on shipping all of the controls below.

NetAdvantage for Win Client - Windows Forms

10.1	New Control – Gantt Schedule New Control – Activity Indicator (Marquee) New Control – MessageBox New Control – WinSplitter New Control Style – Windows 7 Scenic Ribbon New Style – AppStylist ISL for Windows 7 Aero Full Support – Default Multi-Touch Gestures for Windows 7
10.2	New Control – Stylable Form New Styles – Runtime Dialog AppStylist Support New Feature – CLR 4 Client Profile Support New Features – Customer requests in our Feature Tracker System for various controls

NetAdvantage for Win Client – WPF

10.1	New Control – Data Cards for xamDataGrid New Control – Tiles Panel New Editors Feature – Spin Increment New Style – Windows 7 Aero Full Support – Default Multi-Touch Gestures for Windows 7
10.2	New Control – Menu New Control – Context Menu New Control – Slider New Control – Spell Checker New Control – Dialog Window New Control – Tag Cloud New Control – Combo Box New Control – Color Picker

NetAdvantage for Web Client - ASP.NET

10.1

New Feature - WebHierarchicalDataGrid – Outlook Group By
New Control - Tab
New Control – Explorer Bar
New Feature – AJAX Compression
New Style – AppStylist WISL for Windows 7 Aero
Full Support – Default Multi-Touch Gestures for Windows 7

10.2

New Feature – JavaScript Intellisense
New Feature – ASP.NET 4 WebDataGrid Client Templates
New Feature – ASP.NET 4 WebDataTree Client Templates
New Feature – ASP.NET 4 HierarchicalDataGrid Client Templates
New Feature – ASP.NET 4 WebDropDown Client Templates
New Feature – ASP.NET 4 WebDataGrid Domain Data Source
New Feature – WebHierarchicalDataGrid Filtering
New Feature – WebDataGrid Column Summaries
New Feature – WebDataTree Drag & Drop
New Feature – Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippets
New Feature – Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Designer Integration

NetAdvantage for Web Client - Silverlight

10.1

New Control – Office 2007 Ribbon + Windows 7 Scenic Ribbon
New Control – Compression Library
New Control – Combo Editor
New Component – Persistence Framework
New Component – Conditional Formatting Engine
New Feature – xamWebGrid Unbound Column
New Feature – xamWebGrid Template Column
New Feature – xamWebGrid Excel Filter Menu
New Feature – xamWebGrid Virtual Collection
New Feature – UI Automation
Full Support – Default Multi-Touch Gestures for Windows 7

10.2

New Feature – xamWebGrid Column Chooser
New Feature – xamWebGrid Cell Tooltips
New Feature – xamWebGrid Custom Row
New Control – Color Picker
New Control – RIA Services Domain Data Source

NetAdvantage for Silverlight Data Visualization

10.1	New Control - OLAP Pivot Grid New Control - High Speed Data Chart New Control - Relationship Map New Control - Tree Map New Control - Barcodes New Control - Excel Library New Features – Timeline performance, data binding enhancements

NetAdvantage for WPF Data Visualization

10.1

New Control - OLAP Pivot Grid
New Control - High Speed Data Chart
New Control - Relationship Map
New Control - Tree Map
New Control - Barcodes
New Control - Excel Library
New Control – Timeline
New Control – Geospatial Map
New Control – Linear Gauge
New Control – Radial Gauge
New Control – Digital Gauge
New Control – Bullet Graph
New Features – Timeline performance, data binding enhancements

If you’ve made it this far in the post, you’ll notice that we’re shipping a brand new product this year, NetAdvantage for WPF Data Visualization, which brings to market all of the awesomeness in our Silverlight Data Visualization to WPF. We’re also going to bring an innovative Silverlight and WPF scheduling suite of controls to market, you’ll start seeing those CTP’s in Q2. I hope that you also noticed our continued investment in Windows Forms, with 6 brand new controls, including an amazing Gantt control that works just like Microsoft Project!

If you are looking for something and not seeing it, please let me know. I’ll update that roadmap with the Q4 offerings a little later in Q2. And if you have submitted a feature request through support or online, we are going to do our best work those into these releases as well.

As usual, please shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com if you have any questions,

Thanks

Jason

WebDataGrid FAQs and Introduction to Quince Pro

craigshoemaker — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:21:00 GMT

This week I released a few tutorials on commonly asked questions for the WebDataGrid as well as a introductory video demonstrating the exciting new features of Quince.

WebDataGrid Client-Side CRUD

Learn to send add, edit and delete messages for the WebDataGrid from the client. The sample in this demonstration uses the ObjectDataSource, but you may use this approach with any ASP.NET data source control.

WebDataGrid DataViewState vs ViewState

ASP.NET view state is a touchy subject. In recent years the entire concept of view state has been under scrutiny for it’s seemingly easy and endless abuse. But just as the baby should not be thrown out with the bath water, a mishandled tool does not render it useless.

Proper use of view state in ASP.NET pages can help performance (yes, I said help) and provide a number of other workflow and productivity benefits. This article’s aim is to dissect the differences between the WebDataGrid’s two view state properties: EnableDataViewState and EnableViewState.

Read the article

Introduction to Quince Pro

Learn about the latest version of Quince Pro. See how to use the new 'corkboard' features to store examples and collaborate on designs. Learn to print a PDF with all the changes made by different users and get an introduction into private libraries.

Watch the video

How to set up XMLA HTTP Access for SQL Server Analysis Service 2008 and access the Adventure Works 2008 from an Infragistics PivotGrid application

Atanas Dyulgerov — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:01:00 GMT

In this article I will show you how to set up an SQL server that provides analysis services and XMLA HTTP Access to the Adventure Works database. In the end I will show a basic Silverlight application that uses this setup and Infragistics’ Silverlight PivotGrid to visualize the data.

SQL Server Analysis Service 2008

Let us start off with installing the SQL Server. The installation is very straightforward. You just need to follow the on-screen instructions and everything should be fine. There are just a few key points that will require attention (the italics text) and I will tell you what they are as I describe how the setup should go.

The deployment starts with installation of .NET Framework and installer updates that your computer might not have. Then support files are installed.

After those are finished you will be asked to enter your product key and agree to the license terms. Then you will be presented with feature selection choices. We only need a few now to support the basic scenario for this tutorial, but you might want to install more or all of them if you plan to develop more advanced applications or want to combine this installation with other services. The least set of features you must install is this: Database engine services, Full-text search, Analysis Services, Business Intelligence Development Studio, Management Tools Basic and Complete.

Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

BI Development Studio is needed as it is the easiest way to deploy the Adventure Works sample database package. The management tools are needed in order to be able to verify the installation of the server and the sample databases and also you might want to manipulate the data, the databases and settings of the SQL server.

When you are ready with the features, you will need to choose whether you want a default or named instance for the SQL server. If you do not plan to have more than one instance the default is just fine.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Then you will be asked about user account configurations. You can safely select NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE user for all services and add the current user to have administrative permissions wherever that is asked (database engine and analysis services configuration). Note that the user that you add for Analysis provisioning will have to be the one to run the web application, so if you want some other account to serve this admin function you need to create it before you add it here or add it later to the admin role in the management studio (will be discussed later in the article).

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Once you are past the user selection, Error and Usage Reporting choice and the installation rules are checked you will be presented with a summary and you press Install. When the installation process is complete you have just one other issue to consider if you use Windows 7 – the software has a known issue and you must install SP1 before you will be able to use the SQL server.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

To verify that the installation has been successful, go to the start menu and find the SQL Management Studio. Open it and try to connect to the local instance of the Analysis Server you just installed. If you don’t get any errors we are good to go.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

XMLA HTTP Access

After we install the SQL server with analysis services we can continue with the XMLA HTTP access. We need a web server and for the purpose of this tutorial we will use IIS 7. The easiest way to install IIS is to start the Add/Remove Windows Components module of Add/Remove Programs or Turn Windows features on or off from Programs if you are using Windows Vista or 7.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

The features that we need to install are located in the folder Internet Information Services. You can easily go with just a few of the sub-features, but installing everything will get you out of trouble if you want to do advanced applications that might depend on a specific feature of IIS. Mandatory features for our case are the Web Management Tools, .NET Extensibility, ASP.NET, ISAPI Extensions, Basic Authentication and Windows Authentication. However I just installed everything.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

When you press OK the IIS will be installed and started.

In order to configure IIS we need to start the IIS Manager Console. You could either right-click My Computer, press Manage and then look for Internet Information Services or just start the InetMgr.exe from the start menu’s Run.

We start the IIS configuration by creating an Application Pool for our application. Right-click the Application pools and press Add Application Pool.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

In the window that opened give a name to the application pool.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Press OK.

Now we will need to copy some files that will be the base of the website that provides the XMLA HTTP access. They are located under <wherever you installed the SQL server >\OLAP\bin\isapi. In my case that folder is: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSAS10.ASQL\OLAP\bin\isapi. Copy all the files in this folder and paste them in a new one under the root of the Default Web Site. You can go to this folder by right-clicking the name of the site in the configuration manager and pressing Explore. Create a new folder named olap and paste the copied files there. You also need to make sure the user that runs the IIS service has permission to read the files in the folder. Check that by going to the Security section of the Properties on the parent folder (the web root). If the permissions are not correct you will get an error message when you point the browser to that website, saying that the files may not be found or there is no access to the files you are looking for.

The dll file that we copied is the engine that provides the XMLA and the ini is the file that points the engine to the SQL server. If you installed the SQL on a different machine than the IIS machine you will need to modify this file accordingly.

When you have created the olap folder go to the IIS manager again, expand the Default Web Site and locate the olap folder under it. You might need to press refresh for it to show up. When it does, right-click it and press Convert to Application.

In the newly opened window change the application pool to olap.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Once you’ve done that, there are only three steps you need to do to finish this section of the process. The first of these is to add a handler for *.dll to the website. Select the olap folder and from IIS Settings press Handler Mappings.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE At the right side of the screen you will find a link Add script map. Press it. In the Request path type *.dll. Then for the executable, give the path to the msmdpump.dll file in the olap folder and name it olap.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

When you press the OK button you will be prompted to add an ISAPI extension and you need to press Yes.

Now, the second step is to go to the Authentication setting of IIS in the olap folder. By default only Anonymous Authentication is enabled. For the purposes of this tutorial we will use only anonymous, but bear in mind that there are more advanced authentication mechanisms available. Now right-click the anonymous auth and click edit. In the box that opens click the Set button and enter the credentials of the user account you added as Analysis provisional account in the SQL installation step. It might be the user you are currently logged on with, or another one if you have created such specially dedicated for the job. This is the user that will create all connections to the SQL Analysis service.

If you haven’t added the administrative role in the SQL Analysis Service yet as mentioned before you could add access permissions for the default user that starts the olap application and not bother with creating a special service user. To do that you will need to leave the default user (IUSR) in the Authentication page and wait till we install the Adventure Works database. There will be a paragraph instructing you how to grant the needed permissions.

The last step is to go to the IIS global settings (not the olap folder’s settings) and select the ISAPI and SGI restrictions. You will see that the restriction that we were prompted to create for the msmdpump dll has no name. We need to double click on it and then name it olap.

To verify that we have done well we need to point a browser to http://localhost/olap/msmdpump.dll and observe the result. Firefox will show you something similar to this:

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Adventure Works 2008

Now that we have set up the XMLA access to the SQL server, we need data to be able to access from our demo. A very popular set of sample data is the Adventure Works package, and we are going to install just that now.

The files that you need are located here: http://codeplex.com/MSFTDBProdSamples/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx

After you download them start the installation and accept the license agreement.

The next step is to select where to install the samples. After you select the Installation Instance of the SQL Server you can leave everything else to the defaults. Press Install.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

After the process is complete you will have an Analysis Services database installed. Now you have to set up the Analysis Services database. To do that go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Samples\AdventureWorks 2008 Analysis Services Project. Depending on the version of your SQL server, you need either the enterprise (for enterprise or developer versions) or the standard folder. There is an Adventure Works.sln file in those and you should open it. Note that you need to be with elevated user rights when you do that.

When the project is opened with the Business Intelligence Development Studio you just need to right-click the solution and press Deploy. That concludes the sample database installation.

If you haven’t changed the default user that starts the olap application in IIS or you have selected account that is different from the provisioning account (the one that you chose when you installed the SQL server), then you need to grant the right permissions at this point. To do that open the SQL Management Studio and connect to the analysis database. Go to the Adventure Works DW database and right-click the Roles folder. Select new role, give it a name and set the level of access you want to provide through the XMLA HTTP Access.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE After you select the permissions for this role click on Membership and add the user you want to be able to connect to the Analysis service. In the default case the user that runs the olap application in IIS is called IUSR. Adding it should be sufficient if you have not changed it in the Authentication section that was described earlier in this tutorial.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

Infragistics PivotGrid demo

Before we start to build our basic application with the Infragistics PivotGrid we need to make sure that the Silverlight application will be able to communicate with the XMLA interface we have created (the cross-domain problem). This is ensured by the so-called client access policy. You can read more about the network security access restrictions in Silverlight here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645032%28VS.95%29.aspx

The solution to the cross-domain problem is simply creating a text file named clientaccesspolicy.xml in the root of the web server. Note that this is not the folder where the XMLA engine is, but the / (root) folder of the whole web server. Example of its contents is the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<access-policy>

<cross-domain-access>

<allow-from http-request-headers="*">

</allow-from>

<grant-to>

</grant-to>

</policy>

</cross-domain-access>

</access-policy>

Finally when we have data and means to access it we can start building our Infragistics PivotGrid demo.

Create a Silverlight project. Don’t even create a host ASP project, just Silverlight. Before I show you the code you need to add three assembly references.

Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.Olap.Preview.v10.1

Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.Olap.Xmla.Preview.v10.1

Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.PivotGrid.Preview.v10.1

Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.v10.1

Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.XamWebTree.Preview.v10.1

If you don’t already have them you can download the CTP version from this address: http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/silverlight/data-visualization.aspx#Downloads Look for the Betas section and “NetAdvantage for Silverlight Data Visualization CTP (November 2009)”. The downloaded file is a zip and you can find the assemblies under the NetAdvantage_DataVisualization_2010.1\Bin folder.

When we have done that we should add the namespace references in our XAML.

xmlns:igPivot="clr-namespace:Infragistics.Silverlight.Controls;assembly=Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.PivotGrid.Preview.v10.1"

xmlns:Olap="clr-namespace:Infragistics.Olap;assembly=Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.Olap.Preview.v10.1"

xmlns:Xmla="clr-namespace:Infragistics.Olap.Xmla;assembly=Infragistics.Silverlight.DataVisualization.Olap.Xmla.Preview.v10.1"

Finally we are ready to code the body of our sample.

<StackPanel.DataContext>

<Olap:OlapViewModelCreator>

<Xmla:XmlaConnectionSettings

ServerUrl="http://localhost/olap/msmdpump.dll"

CatalogName="Adventure Works DW" />

</Olap:OlapViewModelCreator>

</StackPanel.DataContext>

<igPivot:XamWebPivotGrid x:Name="pivotGrid"

ViewModel="{Binding ViewModel}"

LayoutData="{Binding ViewModel.Result}" />

<igPivot:XamWebPivotDataSelector Grid.Column="1" ViewModel="{Binding ViewModel}" />

</StackPanel>

We need to add one line to the constructor in order to load the data as soon as the application is loaded. I am using lambda expression just to make the code shorter.

this.Loaded += (sender, e) => { pivotGrid.ViewModel.LoadCubesAsync(); };

The four key parts of this code are the following:

1. We specify the connection settings in the DataContext of our LayoutRoot.

2. The PivotGrid main control. Its ViewModel and LayoutData are drawn from the DataContext.

3. A PivotDataSelector allows us to choose what data the PivotGrid should display.

4. The LoadCubes method loads data from the server we have specified in the connection settings.

All that is left now is to test our creation. Hit F5, select a cube to begin, drag and drop columns, rows, measures and filters and play with the PivotGrid :)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

I hope that you have found this article useful and you have enjoyed reading it. If you have any questions or just want to leave comments, please feel free to ask or give feedback. Best of luck with your PivotGrid experiences and have a great day!

It's Interactive Design for a Good Cause

[Infragistics] Derek Harmon — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:24:00 GMT

You have probably heard about this year's PhizzPop Design Challenge being sponsored by Microsoft and The Webby Awards from your fellow interactive designers. If not, you have now! :-)

This is a great contest in which to demonstrate your shop's UX design chops, all for the benefit of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

Did I mention that 3 finalist teams win travel and accommodations to MIX10 in Las Vegas and the winner receives $50,000 towards delivery of their design strategy? (Please read the official press release for details.)

As with many things in this world, the PhizzPop Design Challenge runs on internet time. The deadline for your entry is less than four weeks away—February 19. Now you're probably wondering how can you bring your team together (especially if you work in different offices) in that short of a time to produce the winning design?

How can you communicate always up-to-the-minute examples and patterns to all team members? How can you collaborate on the best user stories 24/7? How can you cultivate the UX patterns that will change for the better how donors, parents, volunteers and the media engage with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America?

In order to tackle these challenges, we're letting all interactive designers and Web developers participating in this PhizzPop Design Challenge use the 5-user version of Quince Pro™ absolutely free for up to 60 days to communicate, collaborate and cultivate their team's design strategies.

Quince Pro is the secure, private and reliable cloud-hosted workspace for creating style guides and design libraries with all of the great features found in the Quince™ UX patterns browser. By using Quince Pro, you can bring your team, your ideas, your inspiration together into one place faster than ever before, and for an incredibly good cause!

Sign-up to try Quince Pro free for 60 days on quince.infragistics.com (if you do not already have a member ID, you will need to register on our Web site):

Under the "Help" menu, choose "Quince Pro Subscription Options" which displays a form describing the different subscription options based on your team's size.
Find and click the large golden "Try a 5-User Subscription Free for 60 Days" button.
You will automatically be set-up as the Librarian of your own private Quince Pro workspace, and can invite 4 more team members to join you and begin developing your design library.

I wish all designers working on the PhizzPop Design Challenge the best of luck, and want to thank you for devoting your creativity to this good cause.

Compiling 2009.2 samples’ source code with Visual Studio 2010

Atanas Dyulgerov — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:39:00 GMT

Dear reader,

Today’s topic will guide you through the process of converting the source of Infragistics Silverlight LoB 2009.2 samples in order to compile with VS2010. Unfortunately this is not exactly as straightforward a task as it might seem at first; however, if you follow this article step by step you should not have any problems.

First, I assume you already have a working installation of Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight. Make sure you are able to compile and run basic Silverlight 3 projects with VS2010 before you proceed. Note that if you have updated VS from 2008 to 2010 on a 64bit machine, for example, there will be a number of VS-related bugs that you need to take care of.

Step 1 – Obtain the code you need:

Download “NetAdvantage for Web Client 2009 Vol. 2 - Silverlight Only“ from http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/silverlightdownloads.aspx You might need to register in order to do that. After you extract the downloaded archive install NetAdvantage_Silverlight_20092_Samples.exe

Step 2 – Convert the project with VS2010

Open SamplesBrowser.Samples.LOB.sln with Visual Studio 2010. The file is located in C:\Users\Public\Documents\Infragistics\NetAdvantage 2009.2\Silverlight\Samples\SamplesBrowser. This is the default location for the samples after they are installed.

When the solution loads you will be asked whether you want to convert it in VS2010 format. Hit Finish. Then you will be asked to convert the project to Silverlight 4. Press No. Silverlight 4 will be supported in our 2010.1 release.

Now that might take some time J.

Step 3 – Remove unnecessary files and services

The rest of the document gives you instructions on how to overcome the errors that will occur if you try to compile the solution at this point.

First remove the three service references in project SamplesBrowser.Shell.Common. They are ContentService, NavigationService and ResourcesService. This step is required because the ContentService does not exist in the solution, and the other two need their addresses updated to match your VS development server settings.

After you have the references removed we need to take out everything that is related to the ContentService. Start with all files with names that begin with Content in the ServiceLayer folder of the same project. Then delete the Content folders from ViewModel, Controls and Model folders. Remove HomePageViewModel.cs from ViewModel. All this is in the same SamplesBrowser.Shell.Common project.

All that is left from the ContentService now is the namespace reference in NavigationBroker.cs which is in the Utility folder of SamplesBrowser.Shell.Common and SampleControlViewModel.cs under ViewModel in SamplesBrowser.Samples.LOB. The line that has to be removed is:

using Infragistics.Samples.Silverlight.Shell.ContentService;

Step 4 – Recreate the services

The next step is to recreate the services with the correct addresses. In order for the changes we made so far to take effect and allow Visual Studio to regenerate the services properly you need to restart VS.

After you do that go to the SamplesBrowser.Shell.Common project, service reference and add new service reference. In the dialog that opens, press Discover and then select the navigation service. Call the namespace NavigationService and press OK. Do the same for ResourceService.

When you have done that, VS should have generated a new ServiceReferences.ClientConfiguration file.

Step 5 – Fix the resource files

This is the last and most tedious step. It is caused by Visual Studio badly regenerating all design files for the resx files. Go to Samples/Resources folder in SampleBrowser.Samples.LOB project. Edit all *.Designer.cs files (there are 20 of them). Each of those files has internal constructor. It must be public. Example: internal AveeStrings() {} should become public AveeStrings() {}

After you are finished with those resources there is just one left: ShellStrings.Designer.cs in the Resources folder of SamplesBrowser.Shell.Common project.

Note that *Designer.cs files are autogenerated and you need to expand the corresponding *.resx file to see it J. You might not see it at first glance.

Well, that is all you need to do. Just Rebuild the whole solution and start the SamplesBrowser.Web.LOB project. Everything should be OK J.

I hope this article was helpful to you. Any feedback or questions are welcome. Thank you!

Simple Column Chooser for XamWebGrid

[Infragistics] Devin Rader — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:33:00 GMT

If you’ve used the Infragistics XamDataGrid or UltraWinGrid, you are probably familiar with a feature each of those controls offers called Column Chooser (or Field Chooser). This simple feature provides a simple UI that allows you to expose a way for end users to select the specific columns they want to see in the grid.

We’ve had a number of requests for this same feature for the XamWebGrid, so I thought I would spend a bit of time and create a simple version. In this post, I will first show you how you can create a simple column chooser for a simple flat grid, and then show you how to create a more complex version for hierarchical grid.

Flat Grid Structure

To create a column chooser for a flat grid structure, I started by creating a simple grid connected to a service that returns data from the AdventureWorks Customers table.

XAML:

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
    <igGrid:XamWebGrid x:Name="xamwebgrid1" Grid.Column="2" 
        AutoGenerateColumns="False">
        <igGrid:XamWebGrid.Columns>
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="CustomerID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="PersonID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="StoreID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="TerritoryID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="AccountNumber" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="rowguid" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="ModifiedDate" />
        </igGrid:XamWebGrid.Columns>
    </igGrid:XamWebGrid>
</Grid>

C#:

public partial class SimpleGrid : Page
{
    AdventureWorksClient client = new AdventureWorksClient();

    public SimpleGrid()
    {
        InitializeComponent();
        client.GetCustomersCompleted += 
            new EventHandler<GetCustomersCompletedEventArgs>(
                client_GetCustomersCompleted);
    }

    // Executes when the user navigates to this page.
    protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
    {
        client.GetCustomersAsync();
    }

    void client_GetCustomersCompleted(object sender, 
        GetCustomersCompletedEventArgs e)
    {
        this.xamwebgrid1.ItemsSource = e.Result;
    }
}

Now I need to create a list of the grid columns that the end user can choose from. What I want to do is place a Checkbox next to each item in that list that toggles the visibility of the corresponding grid column. To do that I am going to use a ListBox with a custom DataTemplate:

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot">
    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
        <ColumnDefinition Width="250" />
        <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" />
        <ColumnDefinition />
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

    <controls:GridSplitter Grid.Column="1" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" 
         HorizontalAlignment="Center" 
         Width="5" Background="Gray" />
    <ListBox x:Name="columnsList">
        <ListBox.ItemTemplate>
            <DataTemplate>
                <Grid>
                    <CheckBox IsChecked="{Binding Path=Visibility}" 
                    Content="{Binding Path=Key}" />
                </Grid>
            </DataTemplate>
        </ListBox.ItemTemplate>
    </ListBox>
    <igGrid:XamWebGrid x:Name="xamwebgrid1" Grid.Column="2"
        AutoGenerateColumns="False">
        <igGrid:XamWebGrid.Columns>
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="CustomerID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="PersonID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="StoreID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="TerritoryID" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="AccountNumber" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="rowguid" />
            <igGrid:TextColumn Key="ModifiedDate" />
        </igGrid:XamWebGrid.Columns>
    </igGrid:XamWebGrid>
</Grid>

Once I’ve added the ListBox, I can bind it to the grids Columns collection:

void client_GetCustomersCompleted(object sender, GetCustomersCompletedEventArgs e)
{
    this.xamwebgrid1.ItemsSource = e.Result;

    this.columnsList.ItemsSource = this.xamwebgrid1.Columns;
}

The ListBoxes DataTemplate contains a CheckBox whose IsChecked property is bound to the Columns Visibility property, and Text property is bound to the Columns Key property. By itself the binding to the to the IsChecked property won’t work because IsChecked is a boolean type, while the Columns Visibility property is of type Visibility. To solve the type mismatch, I created a simple ValueConverter that converts between the Boolean and Visibility property, then added that to the binding:

<CheckBox 
    IsChecked="{Binding Path=Visibility, 
    Converter={StaticResource VisibilityToBool}}" Content="{Binding Path=Key}" />

That's all I have to do to create this simple column chooser UI. Now I can run the project and see the list of columns in the grid:

As shown in the images, I can check and uncheck items in the list and the corresponding columns visibility is toggled.

Hierarchical Grid Column Chooser

The second sample will demonstrate how you can take the general idea of the previous sample and extend it to create a column choose for hierarchical grids. The first thing I did was change my AdventureWorks query to return not only Customers, but SalesOrderHeaders and SalesOrderDetails data, and define the additional ColumnLayouts for these tables in the XamWebGrid. Binding the new query results grid gives me a hierachical structure.

to begin to modify the column chooser to accomodate the hierachy, the first thing I need to do is provide a way for the end users to select the specific Column Layout they want to see Columns for. To do this I put the ListBox into a StackPanel and dropped a ComboBox in above the ListBox:

<ComboBox x:Name="layoutsList" SelectionChanged="GridLayouts_SelectionChanged">
    <ComboBox.ItemTemplate>
        <DataTemplate>
            <TextBlock 
            Text="{Binding Path=Key, Converter={StaticResource EmptyString}}" />
        </DataTemplate>
    </ComboBox.ItemTemplate>
</ComboBox>

Notice that I created a DataTemplate for the ComboBox, even though all I put in it is a simple TextBlock. This was because I need to set a ValueConverter on the binding. Notice that I’ve also wired SelectionChanged event up for the combo. I will use that event later to change the ListBox contents.

In order to populate ComboBox with ColumnLayouts, I need to walk the structure of the grid. I created a recursive method called AddLayout that adds ColumnLayouts to the ComboBox, then recurses any child layouts

public void AddLayout(ColumnLayout parent)
{
    if (parent.Key == "")
        parent.Key = "(no key)";

    this.layoutsList.Items.Add(parent);

    foreach (ColumnLayout child in parent.Columns.ColumnLayouts)
    {
        AddLayout(child);
    }
}

Couple of things to note about this method:

In the 2009.2 release of XamWebGrid, the root column layout does not return a Key value, so I test for this and provide a value. This is a bug that has been fixed and will be released in a Service Release. To work around this issue, I created a ValueConverter that converts the null value returned from the column layout into the string “(root layout)”.
For this method to work, I have to explicitly define the ColumnLayout structure in the XamWebGrid. If you have the AutoGenerateColumns set to True, walking the layout structure will not work because of how the grid lazily loads data. Unless explicitly defined, ColumnLayouts do not exist until they are needed for display in the grid.

The last thing I need to do is bind the ListBox to the currently selected ColumnLayout from the ComboBox in the SelectionChanged event:

this.columnsList.ItemsSource = ((ColumnLayout)e.AddedItems[0]).Columns;

Thats it! Running the sample, I new see that I have a ComboBox above my ListBox, which initially is populated by the root layout columns.

I can change the selected item in the ComboBox to see Columns of other Layouts, and toggle the visibility of those columns.

Conclusion

Thats all there is to creating a very simple Column Chooser UI for the XamWebGrid. The sample project with all of the source code can be downloaded here. You will need to install the 2009.2 release of NetAdvantage WebClient in order to build the sample.

WebDataGrid Basics

craigshoemaker — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:05:00 GMT

Some of our customers are seasoned development veterans that bear the scars of years (or perhaps decades) of deadlines, bug reports and code in production. These veterans exist widely among our customer base, but they are not alone. Other customers approach our toolset not only new to Infragistics, but new to .NET and sometimes even new to development as a whole. In an effort to close the gap of information available to our customers, I’ll be posting links in the coming weeks featuring videos and articles that I produce for those of us who are just starting out.

The first batch of content features the WebDataGrid. Starting with this control makes sense, because in a way, we are all newbies to this new control. Looking toward the future, if there is any topic on the WebDataGrid or any other control that you feel is underserved either on the community site or in the product documentation, please comment below!

WebDataGrid 101: Fill the Grid with Data and Change the Look and Feel

Learn the very basics of working with the WebDataGrid. In this tutorial you learn to:

Get the grid on your page
Bind to a data source
Create custom column definitions
Quickly change the look and feel of the grid

Data Binding the WebDataGrid to Common Data Sources

Learn how to bind data to the WebDataGrid using the following data sources:

Custom Object Collections
ObjectDataSource
SqlDataSource

Label Alignments in Long Forms - New Edition of “Ask UXmatters”

[Infragistics] Tobias Komischke — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:09:00 GMT

UXmatters is a peer-reviewed web magazine about the complete breadth of user experience. I like their professionalism and their spirit. I published a couple of articles last year there. They also have an “Ask UXmatters” column where readers can send in questions and experts submit their answers which are compiled and presented by the UXmatters editors.

Today’s edition revolves around the topic of label alignment in long forms and I was one of 7 experts to contribute my 2 cents. Read it here!

ItemsSource for XamDockManager Elements

[Infragistics] Andrew Smith — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:09:03 GMT

A number of people have asked about binding the ItemsSource of a TabGroupPane to their collection. This is not supported by the TabGroupPane so I thought I would explain why and provide an alternative approach. If you’re looking to bind the DocumentContentHost or even a specific SplitPane to a collection, you should still read on as this solution will allow for that as well.

The TabGroupPane is a derived ItemsControl and the ItemsSource property you see on the TabGroupPane is that of the base ItemsControl class. The ItemsControl is really designed so that whatever containers that are created for items in the ItemsSource are hosted within that ItemsControl – specifically hosted by the Panel indicated by the ItemsPanel property. So items are either automatically pushed into the Children of the ItemsPanel as items are added to the collection or in the case of a VirtualizingPanel, the panel has control over when/which containers are hydrated. Also, once you set the ItemsSource it is not possible to directly change its Items collection – an exception will be thrown by the ItemCollection if you do.

If you think about the TabGroupPane, it needs to be able to manipulate the items it contains – i.e. its Items collection. This can happen for a number of reasons. For example, if the end user pins/unpins a pane, drags a pane into or out of the group, changes the docked/floating state of one of the children, etc. Since that wouldn’t be possible if the control’s items were provided by its ItemsSource (since the Items collection would not be modifiable), the control cannot support binding its Items collection via the ItemsSource.

So how can provide support for this without using the ItemsSource property. If you think about it, the thing that we need is something analogous to the ItemContainerGenerator. This is a class used by the ItemsControl and its associated ItemsPanel to generate containers/elements for items that are not of the desired type. So for a ListBox, ListBoxItem instances are generated for items that are not of that type. Unfortunately the ItemContainerGenerator is not publicly creatable.

So the approach I decided to take was to create my own ItemContainerGenerator type class named ContainerFactoryBase that could be given a source collection and it would maintain an associated collection of containers. Based on the contents of the collection and as the collection raised change notifications it would invoke methods similar to those of the ItemsControl on itself that derived classes could use to create the appropriate container (e.g. IsItemItsOwnContainer and GetContainerForItem) and associate that container with the item (e.g. ApplyItemContainerStyle and PrepareContainerForItem). It would invoke methods as items in the source collection were added/removed/moved so that the derived class could take the appropriate action with the associated container.

I then created a derived class named ContentPaneFactory that creates ContentPane instances as the container for each item and adds it to the associated target. The class exposes several path properties that can be used to bind properties of the ContentPane to properties of the data item including the Header, Content and TabHeader properties. For any other properties, you could either provide a Style for ContentPane using the ContainerStyle property or you could use the ItemBindings collection. Lastly, I also raise an attached event (InitializeContentPane) when a ContentPane is created so you could do any programmatic initialization that might be necessary.

To make this easier to use I created an attached property that would be used to associate the factory with a given target. So you would set the ContentPaneFactory.PaneFactory property to a ContentPaneFactory instance on either a TabGroupPane, SplitPane or DocumentContentHost and that is the target element to which new ContentPane instances are added.

    <igDock:DocumentContentHost >
        <igExtensions:ContentPaneFactory.PaneFactory>
            <!-- Binds to the Documents property of the DataContext. -->
            <igExtensions:ContentPaneFactory 
                ItemsSource="{Binding Documents}"
                HeaderPath="Name"
                ContentPath="." />
        </igExtensions:ContentPaneFactory.PaneFactory>
    </igDock:DocumentContentHost>

You can get the sample here.

HOWTO: Using WPF Converters to style the XamDataGrid

[Infragistics] Alex Fidanov — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:15:00 GMT

There have been a lot of forums posts and questions about how to use Converters and how to bind them to the a cell, multiple cells, or something else.

I have tried to summarize all of these requirements in one place and would be happy to update the sample project on your feedback.

How WPF Value Converters work : they are classes (that implement IValueConverter or IMultiValueConverter interfaces) that provide the ability (custom logic) to convert value(s) of one type to another and vice versa. They can also be used to convert values of the same type, but that is not really what they are meant to do. One really common case is to convert an integer value (for example the Age of a Person) to a Brush or a Color.

The screenshot below covers couple of scenarios:

1. Record Background formatting based on a cell's value ( blue for male, red for female)

2. Cell Background formatting based on the cell's value (Probation field)

3. Advanced Cell formatting based on the cell's value (Age field)

4. Formatting based on multiple cells' values (Salary field)

For example :

public class AgeToBrushConverter : IValueConverter

{

public object Convert(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)

{

if (value == null)

return Binding.DoNothing;

if (value is int)

{

int temp = (int)value;

if (temp < 0)

return Brushes.Red;

if (temp > 0 && temp <= 10)

return Brushes.Black;

if (temp > 10 && temp <= 15)

return Brushes.Blue;

if (temp > 15)

return Brushes.DarkGreen;

}

return Binding.DoNothing;

}

public object ConvertBack(object value, Type targetType, object parameter, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture)

{ throw new NotImplementedException(); }

}

You can find the full sample and source code with comments in the attachments of this blog post.

Creating Custom Summery Operands

[Infragistics] Devin Rader — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:34:00 GMT

The 2009.2 release of the XamWebGrid added the ability to display a summary row in the grid which allows you to display summary information for columns in the grid. The feature includes five summary native summary operands (minimum, maximum, sum, count, average), but is also designed to allow you to easily create and display other summary calculations by creating custom summary Operands.

In this post I will demonstrate how to create a custom summery operand which calculates the standard deviation of using the funds Rate of Return values for the past 36 months in order to determine a mutual funds risk. Using the standard deviation value based on a mutual funds Rate of Return is a common way to measure the risk of a mutual fund.

To get started, I created a Silverlight Navigation application and added a MutualFundInfo class to it. This class contains a RateOfReturn property which contains the values I want to summarize. In the NavigatedTo event of the Home page, I instantiate a List of MutualFundInfo objects and bind that list to a XamWebGrid.

Creating Simple Custom Summary Operands

To get started creating the custom operand, I first create a new class that derives from Infragistics.Silverlight.SummaryOperandBase.

public class StandardDeviationOperand : SummaryOperandBase
{
    protected override string DefaultRowDisplayLabel
    {
        get
        {
            return "Std";
        }
    }
    protected override string DefaultSelectionDisplayLabel
    {
        get { return "Standard Deviation"; }
    }

    public override SummaryCalculatorBase SummaryCalculator
    {
        get
        {
            return new StandardDeviation();
        }
    }
}

This base class includes three methods I need to override:

The DefaultRowDisplayLabel property returns the string I want displayed in the Summary Row when the summary is enabled.
The DefaultSelectionDisplayLabel property returns the string I want shown to the end user in the selection dropdown list.
Finally, the SummaryCalculator property, which returns an instance of the class that contains the actual summary operand calculator.

Once I create the Operand I create the summary calculator by deriving a new class from Infragistics.Silverlight.SynchronousSummaryCalculator. This class includes one overrideable method called Summarize:

public class StandardDeviation : SynchronousSummaryCalculator
{
    public override object Summarize(IQueryable data, string fieldKey)
    {
    }
}

The Summerize method provides me with two method parameters, data an IQueryable that contains all of the data bound to the grid, and fieldKey, which is the name of the column that is executing the Summary. The method expects me to use the IQueryable object to calculate standard deviation (formula shown below) and return an object that represents the summery result.

To solve this formula, I can it down into three calculations:

Calculate the average Rate of Return using all of the values of the period
Sum together the square of the Rate of Return minus the previously calculated average for each value in the period
Finally, take the square root of the sum divided by the number of values in the period

I can use standard LINQ extension methods to perform most of the calculations, but to be able to use them, I first have to cast the IQueryable to a type that I can execute queries against. To do that I can use the IQueryable’s Cast method to cast the data object to an IQueryable<T>, where T is my MutualFundInfo type. Once I’ve cast the IQueryable, I can solve the standard deviation formula and return its result.

public override object Summarize(IQueryable data, string fieldKey)
{
    IQueryable<MutualFundInfo> funds = data.Cast<MutualFundInfo>();

    double avg = funds.Average(d => d.RateOfReturn);

    double sum = funds.Sum(d => Math.Pow(d.RateOfReturn - avg, 2));

    return Math.Sqrt(sum / (funds.Count() - 1));
}

Thats all that is needed to create the operand. Now to use it, I simply add it to the SummaryOperands collection on my grid column:

<iggrid:XamWebGrid x:Name="xamWebGrid1" AutoGenerateColumns="False">
    <iggrid:XamWebGrid.SummaryRowSettings>
        <iggrid:SummaryRowSettings AllowSummaryRow="Bottom" />
    </iggrid:XamWebGrid.SummaryRowSettings>
    <iggrid:XamWebGrid.Columns>
        <iggrid:TextColumn Key="Name" />
        <iggrid:TextColumn Key="Month" />
        <iggrid:TextColumn Key="RateOfReturn">
            <iggrid:TextColumn.SummaryColumnSettings>
                <iggrid:SummaryColumnSettings>
                    <iggrid:SummaryColumnSettings.SummaryOperands>
                        <iggrid:AverageSummaryOperand IsApplied="True" />
                        <local:MutualFundStandardDeviationOperand 
                                  IsApplied="True" />
                    </iggrid:SummaryColumnSettings.SummaryOperands>
                </iggrid:SummaryColumnSettings>
            </iggrid:TextColumn.SummaryColumnSettings>
        </iggrid:TextColumn>
    </iggrid:XamWebGrid.Columns>
</iggrid:XamWebGrid>

Running the demo you can see that the operand shows in the Summary dropdown and the value shows in the footer:

Creating Generic Custom Summary Operands

Of course, one significant drawback to the sample shown above is that it is tightly tied to this specific application because it requires me to explicitly reference the MutualFundInfo object in the Summarize method, as well as know ahead of time about the RateOfReturn property. If I wanted to reuse this same operand in a different grid, I would have to create an new operand that references the type bound to that new grid, and figure out a way to dynamically reference the right property to run queries against. Fortunately, with a bit more code, I can change this operand so that it can be applied to any numeric column.

In order to make this happen, there are two primary problems I have to solve:

How do I cast the IQueryable if I don’t know the type bound to the XamWebGrid until runtime?
How do I execute the calculations on the right property of the IQueryable<T>, since I won’t know that until runtime?

Casting IQueryable to IQueryable<T>

To solve the first issue, I basically have to figure out a way to cast IQueryable, which is what is passed into the Summarize method, to IQueryable<T>, which is what I can run my calculations on. In the previous sample, this was easy because I simply used the Cast method:

IQueryable<T> list = data.Cast<T>();

This obviously won’t work if I don’t know what T is until runtime. The IQueryable object tells me what its underlying type is through its ElementType property, but since I cannot access that until runtime, there is no way for me to use that to call the Cast<T> method. What I need to be able to do is call Cast<T>, where T is dynamically generated at runtime based on the value of the ElementType property. To do this I can use reflection to create a new instance of a generic class at runtime, then I can use that classes generic type to perform my cast.

To get started doing this, inside of my summary calculator class, I create a base class called PlaceholderBase. I need this non-generic base class so that I have a type which can hold my dynamically instantiated generic type. The PlaceholderBase include a single abstract method called GetValue:

public abstract class PlaceholderBase
{
    public abstract object GetValue(IQueryable data, string field);
}

Next, I create a generic type Placeholder<T> that derives from PlaceholderBase. In this Placeholder class I override the GetValue method and perform the actual summary calculation:

public class Placeholder<T> : PlaceholderBase
{
    public override object GetValue(IQueryable data, string field)
    {
        return null;
    }
}

Now that I have the Placeholder classes created, I can use the System.Type.MakeGenericType() method to create a new instance of Placeholder<T>. The MakeGenericType method allows me to pass in the type I want to use for T, which I can get from the IQueryable object:

public override object Summarize(IQueryable data, string fieldKey)
{
    PlaceholderBase plc = 
        Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(Placeholder<>).MakeGenericType(
            new System.Type[] { data.ElementType })) as PlaceholderBase;

    return plc.GetValue(data, fieldKey);            
}

Once I’ve create the generic Placeholder Type, I can use the Activator.CreateInstance method to create a new instance of it. Again, because I cannot define a Placeholder<T> variable ahead of time, the newly created instance is held in a variable of the base type PlaceholderBase.

Now that I’ve created a way to create Placeholder<T>, I can call the GetValue() method. Inside the that method, I can cast the IQueryable to IQueryable<T>, where T is the generic type of my Placeholder<T> type held in the ElementType property.

public class Placeholder<T> : PlaceholderBase
{
    public override object GetValue(IQueryable data, string field)
    {
        IQueryable<T> query = data.Cast<T>();
        return null;
    }
}

Using LINQ Expressions to Run Summary Calculations

Once I have an object I can query, I am once step closer to being able to perform the summary calculations, but I still have the problem that I don’t know until runtime which field of the IQueryable<T> object the calculations should be performed on. Because I won’t know this until runtime, I have to solve this problem again use reflection along with creating and wrapping together a dynamic LINQ Expression which I can execute.

To solve for the standard deviation, I can break the formula down into the same three steps I described in the first part of the post. The first step is to calculate the average of the values in the field I need to sum. To do this, just as I did in the simple sample earlier I can run the Average extension method on the IQueryable<T>, passing into it a Lambda expression indicating which property to execute on. However in this case, instead of being to code that expression ahead of time, I have to do it all dynamically at runtime:

PropertyInfo pi = query.ElementType.GetProperty(field);
ParameterExpression param = Expression.Parameter(query.ElementType, "d");
Expression prop = Expression.Property(param, pi);

This code uses the field method parameter and reflection to get the PropertyInfo object for the field of IQueryable<T> I want to run the calculation on. It then creates two expressions, one that represents the Type I want to run the query on, and one that represents property of that type I want to query. Using these two expressions, I can create a Lambda expression which tells the Average method how to calculate the average of the summary column:

query.Average(Expression.Lambda<Func<T, int>>(prop, param)),typeof(double))

Now there is a small problem with this expression, the Lambda requires that I give it the specific type of the property I want it to execute on. The snippet above assumes that the property I want to Average is of type Int, but that not always be the case, and if I really want this to be a generic Operand, I need to plan to handle any numeric type. To do this, I can simply test the properties return type beforehand and create different expressions based to handle different numeric types:

if (pi.PropertyType == typeof(int))
{
    d = query.Average(Expression.Lambda<Func<T, int>>(prop, param));
}

If I wanted to support several different numeric types, I could simply write several if statements to test for each numeric type I want to support.

Next, I need to sum the square of each summery field value minus the average. I can do this in three sub-steps:

Calculating the summary field value minus the average
Taking that value to a power
Summing.

To start I need to define a new BinaryExpression x that represents the subtraction operation. To create x, I use the Expression.Subtract method:

BinaryExpression x = Expression.Subtract(
        prop, 
        Expression.Constant(query.Average(
            Expression.Lambda<Func<T, long>>(prop, param)),typeof(double)
        ));

The Expression.Subtract method requires me to provide the left and right expressions, which in this case are the property expression prop created earlier and the Average calculation I created earlier (which I convert into a ConstantExpression).

Once the expression is created, I can continue to the second step by wrapping the BinaryExpression in an expression which raises the value to a power. To do this, I can use the Expression.Call method, which allows me to create an expression that calls a method, in this case Math.Pow(). Expression.Call requires me to pass in two parameters: a MethodInfo object representing the method I want to execute, and an array of expressions which represent that methods input parameters. Getting the MethodInfo is easy using reflection:

MethodInfo power = 
    typeof(Math).GetMethod("Pow", new Type[] { typeof(double), typeof(double) });

Now I have to provide the Math.Pow input parameters. The method requires two input parameters; the first is the a value to raise to a power which is represented by the BinaryExpression I create earlier, the second is the power value which I can create using another ConstantExpression:

ConstantExpression y = Expression.Constant(2.0, typeof(double));

Putting everything together, the Expression.Call method looks like this:

Expression lambda = Expression.Call(null, power, new Expression[] { x, y });

Now I can execute the last part of this step which is to use the Sum extension method to sum the values of the

var sum = query.Sum(Expression.Lambda<Func<T, double>>(lambda, param));

I simply pass the expression ‘lambda’ which I have been building up into the method, along with the object type it will execute against and I can now calculate the sum of the square of the field value minus the average. (whew!)

The last step in calculating the standard deviation is to take the square root of the sum I just calculated divided by the number of items in the field, minus 1. This is simple using the Math.Sqrt method:

return Math.Sqrt((sum) / (query.Count()-1));

Once I calculate the final value I can return it as the methods return value which will be displayed by the grid in its summary row.

Conclusion

By default the XamWebGrid makes it very easy to add basic summary calculations to your application by including a variety of common summary calculators, but there may be times where you need to add in your own custom summary calculators. As was shown in this post, the control makes it easy to do this by providing you with the base classes and virtual methods you need to implement to quickly and easily create your own custom summary calculators for columns in your grid. The post also showed how by using a bit of reflection and LINQ Expressions its possible to create your own custom summary calculators that are generic enough to be used by any column in and of your grids.

You cna download the complete sample source here. Note that you will need to have NetAdvantage Web Client 9.2 or later installed in order to build the sample.

Infragistics Community

Setting GroupByRecordPresenter's Background

AJAX Compression in 2010.1

Silverlight 4 with Jeff Prosise, WebDataGrid CRUD & Validation

Silverlight 4 with Jeff Prosise

WebDataGrid Validation

WebDataGrid AutoCRUD

WebDataGrid Manual CRUD

Telling a Good Story with Interactive Line Charts

Q1/Q2 Release Schedule + Roadmap

WebDataGrid FAQs and Introduction to Quince Pro

WebDataGrid Client-Side CRUD

WebDataGrid DataViewState vs ViewState

Introduction to Quince Pro

How to set up XMLA HTTP Access for SQL Server Analysis Service 2008 and access the Adventure Works 2008 from an Infragistics PivotGrid application

SQL Server Analysis Service 2008

Adventure Works 2008

Infragistics PivotGrid demo

It's Interactive Design for a Good Cause

Compiling 2009.2 samples’ source code with Visual Studio 2010

Simple Column Chooser for XamWebGrid

Flat Grid Structure

Hierarchical Grid Column Chooser

Conclusion

WebDataGrid Basics

WebDataGrid 101: Fill the Grid with Data and Change the Look and Feel

Data Binding the WebDataGrid to Common Data Sources

Label Alignments in Long Forms - New Edition of “Ask UXmatters”

ItemsSource for XamDockManager Elements

HOWTO: Using WPF Converters to style the XamDataGrid

Creating Custom Summery Operands

Creating Simple Custom Summary Operands

Creating Generic Custom Summary Operands

Casting IQueryable to IQueryable<T>

Using LINQ Expressions to Run Summary Calculations

Conclusion