ListView columns reorderable

Another finishing touch that I like to see in applications that use ListViews is the ability for the end user to re-order the columns to suit their own preferences. This blog entry discusses one approach for adding this functionality to the ListView control present within the .NET Compact Framework.
Although it is difficult to convey in a static screenshot, the screenshot above shows a user dragging the stylus over the header of the listview control to move the position of the “First Name” column.

Obtaining Draggable Columns

The System.Windows.Forms.ListView control is a wrapper over top of the native ListView control. The native ListView control supports the notion of extended styles, which allow various optional features to be enabled or disabled as desired. One of the extended styles is called LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP. If this extended style is enabled the user can re-order the columns by dragging and dropping the headers shown at the top of the listview while it is in report mode.

Although the .NET Compact Framework ListView control does not expose a mechanism to enable extended styles, we can use a technique discussed in a previous blog entry of mine to add or remove the LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP extended style as desired.

private const int LVM_SETEXTENDEDLISTVIEWSTYLE = 0x1000 + 54;
private const int LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP = 0x00000010;

public static void SetAllowDraggableColumns(this ListView lv, bool enabled)
{
// Add or remove the LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP extended
// style based upon the state of the enabled parameter.
Message msg = new Message();
msg.HWnd = lv.Handle;
msg.Msg = LVM_SETEXTENDEDLISTVIEWSTYLE;
msg.WParam = (IntPtr)LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP;
msg.LParam = enabled ? (IntPtr)LVS_EX_HEADERDRAGDROP : IntPtr.Zero;

// Send the message to the listview control
MessageWindow.SendMessage(ref msg);
}

This method allows the drag feature to be turned on and off for a given ListView control. Notice that this method makes use of a C# 3.0 feature called Extension Methods. The “this” keyword in front of the first parameter means that this method can be called as if it was part of the standard ListView control, meaning the following code snippet will work (assuming listView1 is an instance of the System.Windows.Forms.ListView control).

listView1.SetAllowDraggableColumns(true);

This is pure syntactic sugar, behind the scenes the C# compiler is simply passing in listView1 as the first parameter to the SetAllowDraggableColumns method.

Persisting Column Order Preferences

Once you have reorder-able columns it can be desirable to persist the user’s preferred layout across multiple executions of your application. It would be a pain if the columns always defaulted back to a standard order everytime the form was displayed.

The native ListView control provides two window messages, LVM_GETCOLUMNORDERARRAY and LVM_SETCOLUMNORDERARRAY that can be used to implement this feature. The code sample available for download wraps up these two window messages to allow you to query the current order of the columns by using a statement such as the following:

int[] columnOrder = listView1.GetColumnOrder();
// TODO: save 'columnOrder' to the registry
// or another persistent store

When columns are added to a ListView they are given an index. The first column is column 0 while the second is column 1 and so on. When columns are re-ordered they keep their index value but their position on screen changes. The array returned by the GetColumnOrder function contains the index for each column in the order that they are visible on screen. For example if the array contains the values 2, 0, and 1 it means that the last column (column 2) has been dragged from the right hand side of the listview to become the left most column.

Once we have obtained the order of the columns we can store the data in any persistent storage mechanism such as a file, a database table, or registry key. When the form is reloaded we can initialise the default order of the columns by calling the equivalent SetColumnOrder method with the value we previously saved:

// TODO: should read 'columnOrder' from the registry
// or other persistent store
int[] columnOrder = new int[]{2, 0, 1};

listView1.SetColumnOrder(columnOrder);

Christopher Fairbairn