SalesLogix Web comes with it’s own set of controls to be used on QuickForms. These controls are still in their infancy and will likely grow over time, but for now, there are some things missing that might be perceived as limitations. It’s helpful to know more about what is under the hood of these OOTB QuickForm controls so you can easily work around limitations and push the controls to behave the way you want them to work.

The DataGrid control in the SalesLogix Web architecture is a very simple control. There’s not a lot of “extras” to it at all. One common thing that might be desired with the DataGrid is to specify an initial sort order for it’s data. Looking at the properties for the grid in the QuickForms editor, you won’t see a way to specify this. However, let’s take a look under the hood at the grid control.

The SalesLogix QuickForm controls are located in the assembly named “Sage.SalesLogix.Web.Controls.dll”. If you look at a SmartPart with a grid on it you’ll notice that the grid control is actually called “SlxGridView“. If we open that DLL in reflector and navigate to located SlxGridView we can see the following:

Well cool. It inherits from the standard ASP.NET GridView control. We can take a look at the MSDN docs for the GridView control and see all that it contains. Since the SlxGridView control inherits from System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridView, it has everything that we see listed there, including a Sort method.  

We can take what we’ve learned there and just add some code to a LoadAction for our QuickForm to set the default/initial sort order for the grid. The Sort method takes two parameters. The field or property name to sort by (you can specify multiple properties/fields here, delimited by a comma) and the second parameter indicates the sort direction. I added some code to the LoadAction of the AccountTickets QuickForm to sort the ticket’s in descending order by the ReceivedDate property of the Ticket entities listed in the grid.

grdAccountTickets.Sort("ReceivedDate", SortDirection.Descending);

That is it. While the SalesLogix DataGrid control itself didn’t have anything built in for specifying a sort programatically, knowing where to look makes this an easy task because we get to see what else it has from it’s base type.