Synchronizing a collection of wrapped objects with a collection of unwrapped objects
- by Kenneth Cochran
I have two classes: Employee and EmployeeGridViewAdapter. Employee is composed of several complex types. EmployeeGridViewAdapter wraps a single Employee and exposes its members as a flattened set of system types so a DataGridView can handle displaying, editing, etc.
I'm using VS's builtin support for turning a POCO into a data source, which I then attach to a BindingSource object. When I attach the DataGridView to the BindingSource it creates the expected columns and at runtime I can perform the expected CRUD operations. All is good so far.
The problem is the collection of adapters and the collection of employees aren't being synchronized. So all the employees I create an runtime never get persisted. Here's a snippet of the code that generates the collection of EmployeeGridViewAdapter's:
var employeeCollection = new List<EmployeeGridViewAdapter>();
foreach (var employee in this.employees)
{
employeeCollection.Add(new EmployeeGridViewAdapter(employee));
}
this.view.Employees = employeeCollection;
Pretty straight forward but I can't figure out how to synchronize changes back to the original collection. I imagine edits are already handled because both collections reference the same objects but creating new employees and deleting employees aren't happening so I can't be sure.