C# bindinglist made of bindinglists

Question

Is there a simple way to have a bindinglist composed of several bindinglists? ie that is the "view" of the lists.

That is to say: I have 3 lists (list1,list2,list3). I want a list that is always the union of the 3 listx (we can suppose that no object is contained in 2 different lists).

Certainly, I can succeed in using the ListChange property but maybe there is a smarter way to do this?

Answer 1

To do this you would need to create your own type, implement IList , IBindingList (and ideally IBindingListView ), and optionally ICancelAddNew and IRaiseItemChangedEvents . You'd also need either a public non-object indexer ( public T this[int index] {get;} ) or ITypedList .

From having done things similar to this, I strongly advise you; don't, unless this is really important. It would be more pragmatic to copy the references into a new BindingList<> .

Also; with new items; which list would it go into?

Answer 2

Have you looked into the CompositeCollection class?

Depending on what you're trying to do, it might help: its purpose is to combine multiple collections into a single collection (typically for display/binding purposes). So, you could create a CompositeCollection and add your three BindingList instances to it. The CompositeCollection will automatically update to include the members of the "child" lists.