How to remove sorting glyph in datagridview without removing Sorting facility

Question

How can i remove sorting glyph from column headers in DataGridView without removing its sorting functionality.

I am working on windows form application in C#, i want to generate report from a datagridview, where datagridview column width will assign in report column, where as the DataGridView column include the with of sorting glyph, that is unnecessary space in my case, i want to exclude it from ColumnHeader.

Answer 1

This is actually quite easy to do using custom cell painting.

All you need to do is handle the DataGridView CellPainting event:

dataGridView1.CellPainting += new DataGridViewCellPaintingEventHandler(dataGridView1_CellPainting);

And in the handler do something like this:

void dataGridView1_CellPainting(object sender, DataGridViewCellPaintingEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.RowIndex == -1)
    {
        e.Paint(e.CellBounds, DataGridViewPaintParts.All &~DataGridViewPaintParts.ContentBackground);

        e.Handled = true;
    }
}

The code above is very simple - just check if the current cell is in a header row (has a -1 index) then paint everything except the ContentBackground.

I've only checked this on my Windows 7 machine and it looks fine, it appears that the content background is only used for the sort glyph - you will want to test it on the target environment to make sure you don't need to do any more involved custom painting to keep the ContentBackground without the glyph.

---

The width of the header cell will still include the space for the glyph. I would generally accept that since changing this becomes a bit messy, but if you must have the width fit the text then something like the following will work.

First set the width in the DataBindingComplete event of the DataGridView:

void dataGridView1_DataBindingComplete(object sender, DataGridViewBindingCompleteEventArgs e)
{        
    if (dataGridView1.AutoSizeColumnsMode == DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnsMode.AllCells)
    {
        // Loop over all the columns
        foreach (DataGridViewColumn c in dataGridView1.Columns)
        {
            // Work out the size of the header text
            Size s = TextRenderer.MeasureText(c.HeaderText, dataGridView1.Font);

            // Change the autosize mode to allow us to see if the header cell has the 
            // longest text
            c.AutoSizeMode = DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnMode.AllCellsExceptHeader;
            if (s.Width + 10 > c.Width)
            {
                // If the header cell is longest we set the column width
                c.AutoSizeMode = DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnMode.None;
                c.Width = s.Width + 10;
            }
            else
            {
                // If the header cell is not longest, reset the autosize mode
                c.AutoSizeMode = DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnMode.AllCells;
            }
        }
    }
}

Once you have done that you then need to still allow the column to autosize when the cell text is longer than the header.

For that I used the CellValueChanged event:

void dataGridView1_CellValueChanged(object sender, DataGridViewCellEventArgs e)
{
    DataGridViewColumn c = dataGridView1.Columns[e.ColumnIndex];

    if (c.AutoSizeMode == DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnMode.None)
    {
        Size s = TextRenderer.MeasureText(dataGridView1[e.ColumnIndex, e.RowIndex].Value.ToString(), dataGridView1.Font);
        if (s.Width > c.Width)
        {
            c.AutoSizeMode = DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnMode.AllCellsExceptHeader;
        }
    }

}