How to suspend a DataGridView while updating its columns

Question

How can I suspend a .NET DataGridView from displaying anything while I update its Columns?

Here\'s my current code. It works ok, but it is very slow on the foreach

Answer 1

In my case suspend and resume layout did not work. I resolved disabling the dataGridView (dgv.Enabled = false) before update and re-enabling it (dgv.Enabled = true) at the end of the update process.

Answer 2

You could try and prevent it from completely redrawing by using the code in this post. The parent would be the parent of the dataGridView1.

Answer 3

Significant performance increase:

var dgv = new DataGridView();
dgv.SuspendLayout();
// Do update, change values
dgv.ResumeLayout();

May not be ultimate high performance.

Answer 4

You may want to consider using the AddRange method instead of Add. The Data Grid behaves a little better when you add them all at once.

DataGridViewColumn[] columns = new DataGridViewColumn[dt.Columns.Count];

for (int i = 0; i < dt.Columns.Count; i++ )
{
    DataColumn c = dt.Columns[i];
    DataGridViewTextBoxColumn col = new DataGridViewTextBoxColumn();
    col.SortMode = DataGridViewColumnSortMode.NotSortable;
    col.DataPropertyName = c.ColumnName;
    col.HeaderText = c.Caption;

    columns[i] = col;
}


dataGridView1.Columns.AddRange(columns);

Answer 5

If you are using timer then use SynchronizingObject. This removes the flickering completly for me.

var dgv = new DataGridView();
System.Timers.Timer timer = new System.Timers.Timer();
timer.Interval = 1000;
timer.SynchronizingObject = dgv;  // syncronise
timer.Start();
timer.Elapsed += Timer_Elapsed;
void Timer_Elapsed(object sender, System.Timers.ElapsedEventArgs e)
{
    refreshDGV();  // in here I refresh the DataGridView
}

Answer 6

You can use VirtualMode with DataGridView in order to very efficiently update the grid. See this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171622.aspx

From what I remember, it seems to update the entire collection before updating anything on the UI, as opposed to adding to the UI for each new row added/etc.