Today, we like to show how easy it is to just enable the various grid filtering features in our VCL power grid TAdvStringGrid and offer this to end users with just setting a few properties.

The grid has different filtering options, but there are tree main types:

1. A filter dropdown : this is a dropdown list from where the user can select the values for filtering
2. A filter dropdown checklist : this is a dropdown checklist from where the user can select one or more values
3. A filter edit : this is an edit control in the grid header where the user can type the filter condition

Filter dropdown

Filter dropdown checklist

This is very similar to a regular filter dropdown. All you need to do here is set an additional property grid.FilterDropDownCheck := true in addition to grid.FilterDropDownAuto := true and the dropdown will be a checklist from which one or more values can be selected.

Filter edit

With a filter edit, the user can type in the filter condition himself in the column header cell. There is an additional icon in the header from where the user can select the filter function, such as "Contains", "Starts with", "Larger than", etc...
Filter editing is enabled with a single property grid.FilterEdit.Enabled := true. When the user typed a filter condition and presses enter, the filter is applied. When we set again grid.FilterEdit.Enabled := false, the filtering is removed.

We summarized this with a demo that shows these 3 filter types. Other than the code to load the CSV file containing the sample data, there is nothing more to this than the setup of the grid filter when the user clicks the filter selection via the radiogroup:

procedure TForm1.RadioGroup1Click(Sender: TObject);
begin
  AdvStringGrid1.FilterEdit.CaseSensitive := false;
  AdvStringGrid1.FilterIncremental := true;
  AdvStringGrid1.FilterActive := false;
  AdvStringGrid1.Filter.Clear;
  AdvStringGrid1.FilterEdit.Enabled := false;
  AdvStringGrid1.FilterDropDownAuto := false;
  AdvStringGrid1.FilterDropDownCheck := false;

  case RadioGroup1.ItemIndex of
  1:
    begin
      AdvStringGrid1.FilterDropDownAuto := true;
    end;
  2:
    begin
      AdvStringGrid1.FilterDropDownAuto := true;
      AdvStringGrid1.FilterDropDownCheck := true;
    end;
  3: AdvStringGrid1.FilterEdit.Enabled := true;
  end;
end;

And when running the code, the result is: