How can I customize category sorting on a PropertyGrid?

Question

How can I customize the sorting of categories in a PropertyGrid?

If I set either of the following...

propertyGrid.PropertySort = PropertySor         


        

Answer 1

Like @Marc Gravel said in his answer, there's nothing in the framework that allows this behaviour. Any solution will be a hack. With that said, you can use the solution suggested by @Shahab in his answer as a work-around but that doesn't really indicate your intention to anyone maintaining your code. So I think the best you can do is create a custom Attribute which inherits from CategoryAttribute to handle the process for you:

public class CustomSortedCategoryAttribute : CategoryAttribute
{
    private const char NonPrintableChar = '\t';

    public CustomSortedCategoryAttribute(   string category,
                                            ushort categoryPos,
                                            ushort totalCategories)
        : base(category.PadLeft(category.Length + (totalCategories - categoryPos),
                    CustomSortedCategoryAttribute.NonPrintableChar))
    {
    }
}

Then you can use it as such

[CustomSortedCategory("Z Category",1,2)]
public string ZProperty {set;get;}
[CustomSortedCategory("A Category",2,2)]
public string AProperty {set;get;}

Just make sure you set the PropertyGrid's UseCompatibletextRendering property to true to strip out the non-printable characters for you and the PropertySort set to Categorized or CategorizedAlphabetical and you should be good to go.