The results you get may be the same but the process isn’t.

When you don’t specify the formatting string, then the formatter will use current culture settings it can find in the database server. These settings can easily be changed by an admin for different purposes.

If current culture settings in the server are same to what you want then you are fine as long as those culture settings remain same. When someone changes those settings then the result you get will not be the same.

On the other hand, when you specify the format you can rest assured that the output will be exactly what you want regardless of any cultural changes to the server.

Thanks.

Menol

I don’t see anything wrong in setting the RowFilter value.

Can you debug/trace the click event that causes to throw the exception and see if the value you set has not changed by the time you click on the grid?

Menol

i am using VS 2008 , using C# / SQL with desktop application. my code is here under. can you help with this.

string colName = “”;
switch(cboFilter.Text)
{
case “Our Ref”:
colName = “OurCaseRef”;
break;
….
.
.
.
.
Note : Many cases are there
}

if (colName == “CDOB”)
{

dtCases.DefaultView.RowFilter = string.Concat(“CONVERT(CDOB, System.String) LIKE ‘%”, txtFilter.Text.Trim(), “%’”);

Non string data columns are converted Only in the filtering process. This filtering doesn’t affect the actual data column so your datetime data column will remain date time. Therefore this doesn’t affect (tested in my application) your sorting or any other grid operation.

This solution was introduced to handle “Cannot perform ‘Like’ operation on System.DateTime and System.String.”. problem so are you sure you did following:

1) added a different row filter for each column that you want to search in?
2) added a convert function for each non-string column?

if it helps, following is the actual code I used in my application which runs perfectly at the moment.

            StringBuilder _sb = new StringBuilder();

            foreach (GridColumn _col in DxGrid.Columns)
            {
                if (_col.Visible && _col.Width != 5.0)
                {
                    if (_sb.Length > 0)
                    {
                        _sb.Append(" OR ");
                    }

                    // filter out non string columns and convert them to string before applying the filter cos' those columns don't support LIKE statements
                    if (((DataView)DxGrid.DataSource).Table.Columns[_col.FieldName].DataType != typeof(String))
                    {
                        _sb.Append(string.Concat("CONVERT(", _col.FieldName, ", System.String)"));
                        _sb.Append(string.Concat(" LIKE '%", SearchFor, "%'"));
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        _sb.Append(string.Concat(_col.FieldName, " LIKE '%", SearchFor, "%'"));
                    }
                }
            }

            ((DataView)DxGrid.DataSource).RowFilter = _sb.ToString();

when ever you click on any column. it will through an error “Cannot perform ‘Like’ operation on System.DateTime and System.String.”.

Any solution ?