ListView Personalization






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An article on the personalization and persistance of ListView settings

Introduction
I had the need to personalize a ListView
frequently. As always, The Code Project was my first port of call. Like most good/lazy developers, I'd rather reuse than write from scratch unless I really have to. I found many articles which came close but never quite hit the mark. So I took Guy Baseke's article: Save ListView Settings and modified it to what I needed. I've also tried to include some best practices in the small library I've produced so that people who are not familiar with some of the community tools have a working example that they can refer to.
Background
My biggest problem with the original sample is that it saved the settings to the registry. While this may be common practice, it does require write privileges for the registry which are frequently not available to all users. So it provided me with the perfect opportunity to read up on isolated storage which does not require elevated privileges.
Using the Code
Using the library is trivial. Simply populate your ListView
in the most appropriate manner. You'll probably need an instance level ListViewPersonalisationManager
variable to track the changes for before and after your personalization.
InitializeComponent();
//
// Your ListView should be instantiated and populated,
// create a unique guid for each ListView you wish to personalize.
// The guid is used to differentiate each ListView you wish to personalize.
//
Guid id = new Guid("{XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX}");
manager = new ListViewPersonalisationManager(listView1, id);
// If you have previous settings persisted, they will automatically be
// applied to the ListView by the ListViewPersonalisationManager
Before displaying the personalization dialog, it is important to synchronize the ListView
with the manager in case any columns have been moved or resized.
private void OnSettings(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
// Synchronize any changes made to ListView
manager.SyncWithListView();
ColumnSettingsUI dialog = new ColumnSettingsUI(manager.ColumnDetails);
if ( dialog.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
manager.UpdateListView(dialog.ColumnDetails);
}
To persist the settings to disk:
// True to synchronize to the current state of the ListView or
// false to use current manager state.
manager.SaveSettings(true);
Points of Interest
Technology areas covered:
- Isolated storage
- Serialization
- NUnit
- NCover
- NAnt
- NDoc
- FxCop
History
- 30th July, 2007: Initial post