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Obtain and Set Cell Values

  • 4 minutes to read

This topic describes how you can get and set the values of particular cells in a (Banded) Table View or Card View. For information on getting and setting the values in a Chart View please refer to the Obtain and Set Values in Chart Views topic.

Every cell in a grid View is identified by its record and item. Items refer to the fields in a record. In a (Banded) Table View, items stand for the grid columns. In a Card View, items are card rows. Please refer to the Items section for more detailed information.

At runtime, a user can easily navigate records and edit cell values. When moving from one record to another, any data changed is posted to a database. You can prevent a user from editing cells in a number of ways:

To get/set an item’s value in the focused record, you can use the item’s EditValue property (a variant). You can access EditValue regardless of the data loading mode used. The following code shows how to post changes to the current item using the data provided by a TEdit control.

try
    with tvCustomers do
    if Assigned(Controller.EditingItem) then
    begin
      Controller.EditingItem.EditValue := Edit1.Text;
      //post data
      DataController.Post;
    end;
  except
    on E: Exception do
      ShowMessage('Cannot set a value due to the exception: ' + E.Message);
  end;

Here, tvCustomers specifies a Table View of the TcxGridTableView class. If an error occurs, the exception’s description is displayed within the message box.

Other methods to get/set cell values programmatically differ according to the grid View’s mode.

Get/set values in bound mode

For data-aware Views, you are also able to access record values using TDataSet and TField members. The following code inserts a new record and sets the values for the two fields displayed in the tvFilmsCaption and tvFilmsYEAR columns.

var
  AFieldFilmCaption, AFieldFilmYear: TField;
  AFilmDataSet: TDataSet;
//...
  //get TField objects for corresponding columns
  AFieldFilmCaption := tvFilmsCaption.DataBinding.Field;
  AFieldFilmYear := tvFilmsYEAR.DataBinding.Field;
  //get TDataSet owning fields
  AFilmDataSet := AFieldFilmCaption.DataSet;
  //insert new record
  AFilmDataSet.Insert;
  //set values for the Caption and Year fields
  AFieldFilmCaption.AsString := 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer''s Stone';
  AFieldFilmYear.AsInteger := 2001;
  //post data
  AFilmDataSet.Post;

To access values, you can use the Values property of the View’s DataController as you would normally do in unbound or provide mode (see the section below for details).

Get/set values in unbound mode

In unbound and provider modes, you can use the Values property of the View’s DataController. This returns a two-dimensional array containing the values stored in records and their items. To get the text equivalents of these variant values, use DisplayTexts instead. You need to supply a record index and an item index to address a particular value within either array. An item index provides the item’s displayed position and is determined by the TcxCustomGridTableItem.Index property’s value.

The following code sets the values of the first column (ItemIndex = 0) to the corresponding record indexes:

var
  ARecordIndex, AItemIndex: Integer;
//...
  try
    AItemIndex := 0;
    for ARecordIndex := 0 to tvCustomers.DataController.RecordCount - 1 do
      tvCustomers.DataController.Values[ARecordIndex, AItemIndex] := ARecordIndex;
  except
    on E: Exception do
      ShowMessage('Cannot set a value due to the exception: ' + E.Message);
  end;
See Also