Saving and Loading ListView Content

Better ListView provides methods for storing its content (items with columns and groups) in a file or stream:

SaveContentBinary(string filename)
SaveContentBinary(Stream stream)
SaveContentXml(string filename)
SaveContentXml(XmlWriter writer)

Analogically, there are methods to retrieving the stored content back:

LoadContentBinary(string filename)
LoadContentBinary(Stream stream)
LoadContentXml(string filename)
LoadContentXml(XmlReader reader)

Storing Better ListView content in a file is very easy. The Following sample shows storing the content in a binary file:

// save Better ListView items, columns and groups in a XML file
this.listView.SaveContentBinary("listview-content.dat");

// clear content to ensure it is loaded back correctly
this.listView.Clear();

// restore content from file
this.listView.LoadContentBinary("listview-content.dat");

Visual Basic

' save Better ListView items, columns and groups in a XML file
ListView.SaveContentBinary("listview-content.dat")

' clear content to ensure it is loaded back correctly
ListView.Clear()

' restore content from file
ListView.LoadContentBinary("listview-content.dat")

The content can be stored in either binary or XML format. For example, to store the content in a stream as formatted XML, use the following code:

XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(stream, Encoding.UTF8);

writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;

listView.SaveContentXml(writer);

writer.Close();

Visual Basic

Dim writer As New XmlTextWriter(stream, Encoding.UTF8)

writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented

listView.SaveContentXml(writer)

writer.Close()

Note that in this case it is necessary to have XmlTextReader.WhitespaceHandling property set to None when loading content from formatted XML stream because white spaces need to be skipped during the deserialization process.

Standard Serialization mechanisms are used to store elements and its properties. The methods named above store also mapping between items and their corresponding groups. This cannot be done when simply serializing Groups or Items collection.

When content is loaded into Better ListView, the current content is cleared.