Normally, a record is displayed in a single row in the grid. If the grid is not wide enough to display all of the columns in the record, a horizontal scroll bar automatically appears to enable users to scroll columns in and out of view. For discussion purposes, the following will be distinguished:

• A line in a grid is a single physical row of cells displayed in the grid. Do not confuse this with a line of text inside a grid cell; depending upon the settings of the RowHeight and WrapText properties, data in a grid cell may be displayed in multiple lines of text.
• A row in a grid is used to display a single record. A row may contain multiple lines or multiple physical rows.

Setting the DataView property to DataViewEnum.MultipleLines will display every field of data in the dataset in the available grid area. If the dataset contains more fields than can fit in the grid area, then a single record will span multiple lines. This enables the end user to simultaneously view all of the columns (fields) of a record within the width of the grid without scrolling horizontally:

You can adjust resulting column layout at either design time or run time by changing the widths and orders of the columns. When changing the width of a column, the grid will only increase the size of the column at the expense of the other columns in the line. Unlike previous versions of the grid, the columns will not wrap to another line if a column is resized.

To change the order of the columns while in MultipleLine view, click and drag the column header to the new position. A red arrow should indicate where the column is to be placed. After the column has been dropped, the grid will reposition the columns accordingly.

Note that you can specify a multiple line mode in which the grid does scroll horizontally by setting the DataView property to DataViewEnum.MultipleLinesFixed, see Multiple Line Fixed Data Display for more information.

Implications of Multi-line Mode

Existing row-related properties, methods, and events fit well with the earlier definitions of records, rows, and lines (with two exceptions to be described later). For example:

• The VisibleRows property returns the number of visible rows or records displayed on the grid—not the number of visible lines. If a row spans 2 lines, and the VisibleRows property is 5, then there are 10 visible lines displayed on the grid.
• The RowTop method accepts a row number argument ranging from 0 to VisibleRows - 1. If a row spans 2 lines, then RowTop returns the position of the top of the third displayed row (that is, the fifth displayed line).
• The RowResize event will be fired whenever a row is resized by the user at run time. In fact, at the record selector column, only row divider boundaries are displayed; thus, the user can only resize rows, not lines.

Other row-related properties, methods, and events can be interpreted similarly. There are two exceptions:

1. The first is the RowHeight property. The RowHeight property returns the height of a cell or a line, not the height of a row. Changing this property would break users' existing code.
2. The second is more of a limitation than an exception. Currently the dividers between rows and lines are the same. When the RowDivider object's style property is changed, all dividers between rows and lines change to the same style. That is, different dividers cannot exist for rows and for lines.