Hi Grigore

I understand what you are saying but there are times when some kind of formatting is required. Especially in a table that contains a number of foreign keys. If you use comboboxes to show the matching text you have to set Sparse to False to ensure you can always see the text and that can really slow down the grid also.

Secondly if you use a Select statement it gets more complicated when you add records and have to re-run the Select statement to get the new record included in the cursor. Depending on your network environment this can also be a performance problem. So calculated fields are sometimes useful in these situations without degrading the performance too much.

Simon


>Well, my guess is the most elegant way to solve this is to use that UDF (method, procedure, whatever) in SELECT command and let the grid what it knows to do best: show data from a datasource. Actually, I would descourage any try to make grid to do calculations, or format the source in any way.
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>Let me explain my point of view: grid is a pretty complicated control; it has enough work to do when it shows the data; at least we can easy it's task by handing properly formatted data to it.
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>>Hi Martin
>>
>>I can make different images appear if I use the DynamicBackcolor property to call a method that sets the picture but this is a workaround and clearly not obvious to anyone when they first try to show images.
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>>As far as Calculated Fields go you can do as you suggested but this is of limited use. I often use a Method to return the data I wanted displayed because I may have to use data combined from several tables requiring the use of the Seek() function etc. In the past if the string you assigned to the ControlSource approach 200 or so characters strange things began to happen in the grid. It would be much better if you could simple set the ControlSource to call a method directly then you are free to do what ever you can imagine.
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>>Regards,
>>Simon White