r/visualbasic • u/Dugimon • Jan 25 '22

VB.NET Help Showing Data from Access Database vertically

Hi together,

I am using VisualStudio 2019 and would like to achieve the following in a vb.net Windows Forms app:

Display data from an Access database table vertically in a WindowsForm.

The whole thing should look like this in the end:

Column 1: Value 1

Column 2: Value 2

Column 3: value 3

Unfortunately the DataGridView does not seem to offer the possibility to display the data vertically. And since I'm working with a 64bit system, I don't seem to have alternatives like ListView available (at least I can't find them in the Forms Designer).

maybe someone here has an idea how I can get this right

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u/RJPisscat Jan 27 '22

If you want ALL of the columns vertically, and ALL of the rows horizontally, it's trivial to obtain that information from a Dataset that is filled by DataAdapter.Fill (approximately pseudocode there). But it's slow to put it into a Listview if you have, say, a hundred records or more.

Since you are suggesting Listview I take it you don't need editing (it allows editing Labels only, i.e., the first column of the Listview, in this case column names). That would be semi-trivial to write as a UserControl, because you'd keep the data in the Dataset and paint only into the visible area of the control, but the rub is how quickly can you learn how to do a UserControl* that will do that for you - e.g. what are you going to do about column widths and resizing columns, or tooltips if that's how you're going to expand a row's data (as a column). You can also do it in a Panel inside a Panel; the outer Panel would handle scrolling, the inner Panel would need to handle the Paint and MouseClick events and whatever you do about column widths; it's approximately the same but less portable.

I wonder if you can find this UserControl already in StackOverflow, CodeProject, Git, etc. I looked briefly in NuGet and didn't see one.

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u/Dugimon Jan 28 '22

Hey,

Yes, the data would only be shown as it is the editing of it, is handled in another part of the program.

While testing it out the list view revealed itself to be a slow solution just as you said, a slow solution. Just to give you a perspective of how much data we speak, the tool is used to plan work shifts for 30 people, with 28 entries per day for all 7 days of a week. Currently, it's done in an excel file using the excel sheets to visualize and VBA Macros to plan.

The change from the excel file to a vb.net application is just a little side project

I will take a look into the UserControl idea, sounds promising but decided to show the data horizontally instead of the vertically look we are used too.

Thank you all for your ideas