There is so much power packed into TAdvStringGrid that it becomes a challenge to know and unlock all its power. Hence this new series "Grid Goodies". Let's bring two extremely easy to use yet powerful features of TAdvStringGrid.
Smart clipboard
The grid has numerous settings to fine-tune the exact behavior for clipboard handling you want to have. One lesser known feature is the built-in smart clipboard handling. This is enabled by setting grid.Navigation.AllowSmartClipboard = true. What this means is that when you copy a range of cells values to the clipboard with grid.CopySelectionToClipboard and you paste this range into a cell range with a different size, it will try to perform in a smart way what you expect on the different range of cells where you paste, like for example automatic number or date increments. This isn't limited to performing copy & paste, it can also be enabled for when you select a range of cells and resize it with the mouse. This is enabled with grid.SelectionResizer = true. Of course, for this to work, the grid must be enabled for editing and cell range selection. We decided to make it ultra easy to enable all this functionality by setting one public property instead of going over all different properties involved here, and that is:
grid.SpreadSheet := true;
When this is enabled, this becomes possible without any code except the button OnClick handlers calling grid.CopySelectionToClipboard / grid.PasteSelectionFromClipboard:
Easy highlighting
The second goodie we want to reveal is highlighting matching text in the grid. Although the grid has built-in filtering, various built-in search functionality, on the fly highlighting of matching values can be that convenient feature you are looking for. And it cannot be easier to use. All you need to do is call:
grid.Hilight(FixedCells, CaseSensitive, YourText);
So, for this example, all we did was attach an OnChange event handler for the edit control and call from there:
procedure TForm1.Edit1Change(Sender: TObject);
begin
AdvStringGrid1.HilightInGrid(false,false,Edit1.Text);
end;
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