DataGridView binding to an object's “ToString” property

Question

I am binding a list of objects to a Winform DataGridView. This works fine and has a column for each property on my object. I have now overridden the “ToString” on the object that outputs text based on the properties. I would now like to change my DataGridView so that it has a single column that binds to the “ToString” property of my object. Is this possible, as so far I've not found a way to do this.

Answer 1

as far as I know binding works with properties, so you need to create property in your class, which will return result of ToString() :

public class Person
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }

    public string Text { get { return ToString(); } }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return String.Format("{0}, {1} years", Name, Age);
    }
}

and here a way to force grid to NOT create columns for anything except Text property:

grid.Columns.Add(new DataGridViewTextBoxColumn() {DataPropertyName = "Text", HeaderText = "Custom ToString value"});
grid.AutoGenerateColumns = false;

binding:

var people = new List<Person>()
    {
        new Person() {Name = "A", Age = 20},
        new Person() {Name = "B", Age = 30},
    };
grid.DataSource = people; 

Answer 2

I managed to fix this by following this link: Binding List Of String

The solution was to wrap each string so that the binding mechanism knew what to bind.