I didn't see a post anywhere on this and have been looking around trying to see if there is something already built in the .Net Framework but don't see it.

I want to use DataGridView (DGV) to allow users to create some data that I will store as XML for the application to use later. The DGV is a nice tool for displaying data and allowing users to edit it. I've done this sort of thing in the past by reading the rows and columns out of the DGV and creating the XML objects using XMLDocument. But it seems to me that this is a common enough task that Microsoft would have built it into a DataBinding or some thing to allow you to use DataSets and DataTables to reduce the coding required to do in manually.

Everything I've found so far seems to want you to manually build the XML document mimicking the columns you have already defined using the DGV gui when you desigend the form. Before I run off and build this myself, is anyone aware of class in the framework that does this? And how to use it to generate the DataTable from the DGV?

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What you don\'t know can hurt you!

DataSet.GetXml will return an XML representation of the data in a dataset. This might not be in the XML format you want however.

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/- Sam Judson : Wrox Technical Editor -/

Think before you post: What have you tried?

Sam, if I understand it correctly DataSet.GetXML requires the DataSet to already be defined. I want to define the DataTables in the DataSet automatically at run time from the structure of the DataGridView as defined at design time.

I can do this by extending DataGridView to provide a method that creates a DataTable as mentioned and then binds it to the DataGridView. I notice that if you try to assign a BindingSource to a DGV that has not been previously bound you get a Null value.

I am looking for Microsoft to have provided this functionality somewhere as it seems to me to be a common requirement.

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What you don\'t know can hurt you!