Hiding Column Headers

To hide column headers, simply set HeaderStyle property to BetterListViewHeaderStyle.None. There are other possible styles for all column headers:

• None – column headers are hidden, but corresponding sub-items are still visible
• Nonclickable – column headers are visible, but not interactive
• Clickable – column headers interact with mouse (have hot and pressed state)
• Sortable – column headers are clickable and sort the corresponding column when clicked
• Unsortable – same as Sortable, but the column headers have unsorted state as well
• Hidden – column headers are hidden with corresponding sub-items

These styles can be set on individual column headers as well through BetterListViewColumnHeader.Style property. This property is of type BetterListViewColumnHeaderStyle, which has the same values as BetterListViewHeaderStyle, plus Default value, which means that column header style is inherited from the HeaderStyle property.

When a single column header have style None, that column header is not drawn (only its background is visible) and corresponding sub-items are visible.

When all column headers have style None,  the whole panel with column headers hides (as seen on the above animation) and the sub-items remain visible. This effect is the as when all column headers have style Default and HeaderStyle is set to None.

Making items invisible

The above image shows two groups of items. The first groups uses hiding of items with the Visible property, while the second group simply turns off drawing of ceratin items.

The first approach is useful when you need to hide item as if it is removed, but keep it actually within Items collection.

The second approach need to create new control inheriting from BetterListView, overrride the OnDrawItem method and set properties like BetterListViewDrawItemEventArgs.DrawImage to false or simply not call the base implementation of OnDrawItem.

The second (owner drawing) approach is useful when you need just to switch off display of item without changing the item layout.

When someone wants to remove a column, he usually thinks of simply removing the column header from the Columns collection. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The sub-items get shifted and he needs to remove sub-items corresponding to the removed column for all items as well.

This is because ListView is not a control for displaying grids (a matrix of cells), but really the lists – sequences of objects, and the sub-items are not cells either, they are something like an extension of each item to support additional information about the item.

So how we neatly hide a column?

We introduced Column Hiding feature in the version 2.0.1. You can simply call Hide() on your column header instance and you’re done! There is also corresponding Show() method provided. Or you can set boolean Visible property. Now the column and all subsequent sub-items are hidden from view (although they are still present in data, of course):

Hiding column via context menu...

...and the sixth column gets hidden.

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