c# - ListView - Align vertical grid lines with Headers dividers - Make last Column fill the space

Question

I am trying to write a Windows Forms MusicPlayer application in C#.

The application should show a list and have some play / stop buttons.

I just started half an hour ago, but my design is almost finished. Now I got 3 things to fix. A bug and 2 good looking things:

1. on the picture you can see the bug I've found. You might say that's nothing, but its a eye catcher. How can I fix this?

   

2. how can I align center the headline of a column, without centering the content?

3. how can I make the last column filling out the rest of the listView?

Answer 1

• You can set the TextAlign of all but the 1st Column's Header; it is always left aligned. To change that you need to owner draw it.

• There is no automatic filling option so you need to write a setColumnwidth function, that loops over all but the last columns and sums their Widths; then it subtract the sum from the ListView's Clientsize.Width and set the last column's Width.

• The display bug in the gridlines is new to me; so far I don't know how to fix it; maybe owner-drawing will help there as well..?

Update:

Here is some code:

void setLastColumnTofill(ListView lv)
{
     int sum = 0;
     int count  = lv.Columns.Count;
     for (int i = 0; i < count   - 1; i++) sum += lv.Columns[i].Width;
     lv.Columns[count   - 1].Width = lv.ClientSize.Width - sum;
}

After setting OwnerDraw = true you could code the three (all are needed!) Draw event :

private void listView1_DrawColumnHeader(object sender, DrawListViewColumnHeaderEventArgs e)
{
    e.Graphics.FillRectangle(SystemBrushes.Menu, e.Bounds);
    e.Graphics.DrawRectangle(SystemPens.GradientInactiveCaption, 
        new Rectangle(e.Bounds.X , 0, e.Bounds.Width , e.Bounds.Height) );

    string text = listView1.Columns[e.ColumnIndex].Text;
    TextFormatFlags cFlag = TextFormatFlags.HorizontalCenter 
                          | TextFormatFlags.VerticalCenter;
    TextRenderer.DrawText(e.Graphics, text, listView1.Font, e.Bounds, Color.Black, cFlag);
}

private void listView1_DrawItem(object sender, DrawListViewItemEventArgs e)
{
    e.DrawDefault = true;
}

private void listView1_DrawSubItem(object sender, DrawListViewSubItemEventArgs e)
{
    e.DrawDefault = true;
}

You may want to play a little with the colors or the widths..

If you have an ImageList containing images for displaying the sort order (or other things) you can add this to draw them as well:

 ColumnHeader colH = listView1.Columns[e.ColumnIndex];
 int ii = colH.ImageIndex;
 if (ii >= 0 && ii < imageList1.Images.Count) 
            e.Graphics.DrawImage(imageList1.Images[ii], 
              e.Bounds.Width + e.Bounds.X - imageList1.ImageSize.Width, 0);