Simple Row Coloring in a KendoUI Grid
So you want to color the rows of your KendoUI grid based on the grid data. This is one of those problems that seems like it should be really simple, but if you search the Internet you'll turn up a bunch of convoluted answers. Most of the recommendations relate to row templates. That's fine if you want to completely restyle the grid rows, but just changing the background color shouldn't be so hard. Thankfully, there is a better way.
How I Export Kendo Grids to Excel (or CSV)
Exporting grid data is a common need for line-of-business applications. Once you’ve got all the great data presented, filtered, etc. how to you allow the user to download it and continue playing with it? There are many approaches discussed online to solve this (see here and here). Unfortunately, I didn’t find any of them really had the polish I wanted and that my users demand. There are really two categories of solutions to this problem:
How to Post Data (Including Checkboxes) in a KendoUI Grid back to an ASP.NET MVC Action
The KendoUI grid is great for displaying data and manipulating it one row at a time. There are several options available including posting the edited data back via AJAX, performing in-line editing, etc. However, there is no built-in support for posting the grid data on form submission because the grid isn't an actual form control. This came up recently when designing a feature for an enterprise contact list. I had a view that should allow the user to select two contacts and merge them into one. The user needed to be able to select which addresses, phone numbers, etc. from both contact should be kept in the merged contact. A grid seemed like a perfect interface match since it supports multiple columns and I could (presumably) add a checkbox to the first (or last) one for the user to select. This turned out to be much more complicated than I had anticipated and there isn't a lot of help out there, so I'll walk you through the process.
Automatically Generating Column Titles For A KendoUI MVC Grid
I love KendoUI, especially because of the available MVC wrappers. It is a very well engineered product with lots of opportunity for extension, and in this post I'll briefly discuss one that should relieve a small pain point: generating grid column titles from a DisplayAttribute data annotation. As you probably already know, you can change the way your UI layer presents properties of your model by applying the DisplayAttribute data annotation. This causes most of the UI code to use the Name property of the attribute when displaying that property. It looks like this: