ComCtl32 Header Control

This article provides a fully-featured Header Control directly from COMCTL32.DLL. The latest version uniquely provides support for Outlook-style drag-drop grouping of columns as well as in place column filtering.

It is a good building block for generating your own controls. Check out the S-Grid project to see the control in use in an all-VB grid control (new version with auto-grouping coming end of April!)

Features of the Header Control

• Outlook-style grouping of columns:
  

  Starting a group

  

  Adding another column to a group

• In place filtering of columns with filter text boxes and buttons. The code for this feature can be extracted and applied to ComCtl32 ListView controls too.
• Drag-drop reordering of columns.
• ImageList support allowing an icon to be displayed to the right or left of a header.
• Mouse-over highlighting of column headers ("Hot Tracking").
• Full set of header events: column left and right clicks, divider double clicks and drag-drop. You can prevent columns from being resized, dragged and restrict widths the user can choose.
• Set whether the control has buttons or not (like in RegEdit) at run-time.
• Set alignment of header columns left, right or centre.
• Full Unicode implementation under NT.