Thursday, February 15, 2007

DataGrid copy to clipboard

Here's some code I knocked together to copy the contents of a WinForms DataGrid to the clipboard. Probably won't work for all possible data sources but it was good enough for my needs. 

    public void CopyToClipboard()
    {
      StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
      for (int i = 0; i < ts.GridColumnStyles.Count; i++)
      {
        if (i > 0)
          builder.Append("\t");
        builder.Append(ts.GridColumnStyles[i].HeaderText);
      }
      builder.Append(Environment.NewLine);

      CurrencyManager manager = (CurrencyManager)BindingContext[DataSource];

      if (DataSource is DataTable)
      {
        DataTable dt = (DataTable)DataSource;
        foreach(DataRowView r in manager.List)
        {
          for (int i = 0; i < dt.Columns.Count; i++)
          {
            if (i > 0)
              builder.Append("\t");
            builder.Append(r[i].ToString());
          }
          builder.Append(Environment.NewLine);
        }
      }
      else if (DataSource is IList)
      {
        for (int i = 0; i < manager.List.Count; i++)
        {
          object item = manager.List[i];
          Type objectType = item.GetType();
          for (int j = 0; j < ts.GridColumnStyles.Count; j++)
          {
            string colName = ts.GridColumnStyles[j].MappingName;
            PropertyInfo propInfo = objectType.GetProperty(colName);
            object propertyValue = propInfo.GetValue(item, null);
            if (j > 0)
              builder.Append("\t");
            builder.Append(propertyValue.ToString());
          }
          builder.Append(Environment.NewLine);
        }
      }
      else
        throw new NotSupportedException();

      Clipboard.SetDataObject(builder.ToString(), true);
    }

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alternatively a quick an dirty solution that will work for any data:

MyDataGrid.SelectAll();
MyDataGrid.Focus();
SendKeys.Send("^(c)");

Anonymous said...

Anonmyous guy, your solution was too good. Except that it doesnot copy headers, but that is okay.

Anonymous said...

If you want to copy the headers, then ensure that ClipboardCopyMode has been set to the appropriate value:

MyDataGrid.ClipboardCopyMode = DataGridClipboardCopyMode.IncludeHeader;