How to create a dynamic model for ObjectListView

Question

I searched for hours but either my programming approach is wrong or I didn't have the correct searching ideas...

Lot of time ago, I discovered ObjectListView as an nice alternative to normal ListView. My Problem in my current Project:

I didn't have an static model class. I have a lot of objects of different kinds. Each kind of object has different attributes. In my ObjectListView I want to show the Name of the Object and its attributes, a row for each object of given kind. (For one kind of a Object, the attributes are the same)

For my Model of ObjectListView I tried following Mini-example (using "num" and "txt" as AspactName):

using System.Dynamic;
[...]
private void addItems()
{
    dynamic expando = new ExpandoObject();
    expando.num = 1;
    expando.txt = "Element";

    List<ExpandoObject> lst = new List<ExpandoObject>();
    lst.Add(expando);
    olv.SetObjects(lst);
}

ObjectListView adds an Row but doesn't show up the text of the Properties num and txt.

Any Idea to solve this problem? Is there another approach to show elements of a List (like Object.Attributes) as Columns using ObjectListView?

Thank you in advance.

---

Okay, Thank you Klaus, following your idea in my mind and searching again for special Objects and ObjectListView pointed me to AspectGetterDelegates

I found a solution working for the first time: adding following AspectGetter Delegate, the ObjectListView shows the information of my dynamicaly generated Properties:

olv.GetColumn(0).AspectGetter = delegate (dynamic er) { return er.Nummer; };
olv.GetColumn(1).AspectGetter = delegate (dynamic er) { return er.Text; };

If someone has the same Problem, here are two useful Methods for Setting and Getting Properties from ExpandoObjects:

    public static void AddProperty(ExpandoObject expando, string propertyName, object propertyValue)
    {

        var expandoDict = expando as IDictionary<string, object>;
        if (expandoDict.ContainsKey(propertyName))
            expandoDict[propertyName] = propertyValue;
        else
            expandoDict.Add(propertyName, propertyValue);
    }

    public static object GetProperty(ExpandoObject expando, string propertyName)
    {

        var expandoDict = expando as IDictionary<string, object>;
        if (expandoDict.ContainsKey(propertyName))
            return expandoDict[propertyName];
        else
            return null;
    }

Answer 1

I am also a user of ObjectListView and find it very good, but had a similar problem recently where I had such dynamic objects. In fact, in my case I did not know at all the property names in code, this only came from the data and I had the complication of having to flatten out the data which was in a parent child hierarchy.

My problem is here: Flattern child/parent data with unknown number of columns

The solution for me was to use a variant of OLV which is DataListView (appears not to be available via NuGet, but is as download from the OLV website http://objectlistview.sourceforge.net/cs/download.html)

Then, once I had my data in a Dynamic object (like you have) I then converted this into a DataTable which I could bind to the DataListView

My data was stored in:

List<dynamic> allRecords = new List<dynamic>();
//Build my dynamic data here

I converted this to a DataTable:

private DataTable GetDataTableFromObject(List<dynamic> allRecords)
{
    DataTable dt = new DataTable();
    foreach (dynamic record in allRecords)
    {
        DataRow dr = dt.NewRow();
        foreach (dynamic item in record)
        {
            var prop = (IDictionary<String, Object>)item;
            if (!dt.Columns.Contains(prop["Column_name"].ToString())) //Column_Name = Property name
            {
                dt.Columns.Add(new DataColumn(prop["Column_name"].ToString()));
            }

            dr[prop["Column_name"].ToString()] = prop["Data"];  //Data = value
        }
        dt.Rows.Add(dr);
    }
    return dt;
}

Then I added it to the DataListView

this.dataListView1.DataSource = GetDataTableFromObject(allRecords);
this.dataListView1.RebuildColumns();