WPF - DataGrid Column with Width=“*”, but MinWidth to Fit Contents

Question

What would be the best/right way to have a set of DataGrid columns have proportional width (Width="\*"), but to have their minimum width be at least the width of their content? At the moment, if I use Width="*", then the columns stay exactly proportional, but content gets cropped if the columns get too thin. If I use Width="Auto", then the columns size themselves perfectly to their content, but this makes them all different sizes.

What I want is really a combination of the two, like Width="\*", MinWidth="Auto" so that when there's extra width the columns will all space out to equal widths, but when the grid is made smaller, the content never gets cropped.

Sadly, MinWidth="Auto" doesn't exist, so I guess I need to bind the column's MinWidth property, but it's hard to figure out exactly what I would bind it to.

How do I tell WPF "MinWidth=" the width of the column's widest piece of content?

Answer 1

I know its a bit late, but I found your question and programmed a pure-XAML solution.

 <ColumnDefinition Width="42*" MinWidth="{Binding Path=ActualWidth, ElementName=projectInfoHeader }"/> 

Where the ElementName points to the control taking up most of the space. Of course thats only possible to do with elements, that do have a limited width. If you do it for example for a GroupBox, than you can resize only to larger width and never resize to smaller one.

If you have several candidates for the value of MinWidth, you need to write yourself a IMultiValueConverter, which takes an object[], parses it to floats, and returns the maximum (its just 1 linq query if you use it only yourselves and don't need to handle bad usage of the converter)

This way also supports dynamic changing of the MinWidth.

Answer 2

Set Width = "Auto" in XAML.

Then in the code:

MinWidth = ActualWidth
Width = new GridLength(1, GridUnitType.Star)

Answer 3

I also had problems to size Grid columns correctly inside the GridViewColumn. There were several things that I tried but then I found the UniformGrid. It was the ultimate solution for me. It just works. I haven't knew it before...seems that it doesn't exist in VS toolbox by default (?) and thus didn't know it even exists.

You can find more about UniformGrid from here.

Answer 4

Give the column a name in the XAML:

<Grid>
      <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
             <ColumnDefinition Width="*" Name="Col1"/>
             <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
      </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
</Grid>

Then set the MinWidth property in the code as shown below:

public MainWindow()
{
    InitializeComponent();

    Col1.MinWidth = 340; //enter desired minimum width here
}