We have a line on what's causing the column size issue.  When the grid renders, there's a horizontal scrollbar which allows you to scroll to access columns outside the view of the entire grid.  In this case, when you resize a column, it shifts everything to the right as it should.

However, we get inconsistent rendering in our environment and we don't know why.  The grid comes up without horizontal scrollbars and so the grid goes into this "auto-size" mode which then tries to refit everything into the viewable area instead.  So if you resize a column, it impacts all other columns.

If I reload the page, the grid will arbitrarily render in this "auto-size" mode or, eventually, renders correctly with the horizontal scroll bars.  And when it does render correctly, I can't duplicate the size issue wither.  So now we just need it to render correctly consistently.

However, we have another issue.  When it renders correctly, it takes, for example, 2 minutes to render as opposed to just a few seconds when it's in this "auto-size" mode.

[UPDATE] Okay, I've tracked down the column size issue and it's directly related to this setting: AutoFitColumns="true"

We have this set to false in this test and it renders with the horizontal scroll bar.  However, when you set it to true (in the skin file) it sizes the columns within the viewable area.  You can easily duplicate this by setting it to true and then use the best fit option from the header context menu.

Hi Julia,

We can really use this feature.  It's critical to us that we're able to use a custom check box as a row checker.  I'm just a developer and am not the one who makes the final design decisions and I know that the standard default row checker is unacceptable due to it conflicting with the rest of the UI look of our application.

However, I do have the initial solution working, although it's a pain because I have to repost the page, i.e., do a page refresh under certain circumstances, but we're doing that anyway since operations like ungrouping and adding columns updates the structure and right now there's no way to update it dynamically.  I submitted a feature request for that too months ago through Handy.  I hope that will be available some time soon?

Yes, I have no issues with sorting, moving columns, resizing columns and refresh data.  I've provided details as I moved along this solution.  I didn't know this information at the beginning when I posted the original question.  At that point, I just knew we needed a custom row checker.  I didn't know about any of the issues that cropped up later.  Thanks Julia.

Here I attached my simple sample on how to add the checkbox to WebGrid's header. I hope this sample could help.

 There's an issue with this approach, even though it's the only one I can think of too, in that any post backs for sorting or grouping of columns will cause the check box to disappear.

In our environment, the grid is a custom control and there may be more than one grid on a page, so the row checker check box must be created dynamically from within the grid.  This is fine, however, I'm trying to solve the problem on post backs when the grid re-renders itself, it seems to ignore any javascript that attempts to reinsert the check box.

The check box is in the header yet it does not show when the grid is rendered on post back.  We've gotten around issues with post backs, like those when we update our grid structure, by forcing a page reload.  I'd like to avoid doing a page reload if I can solve this by having the grid correctly render the check box.  Do you have some ideas, or can you update your sample so it shows the check box when you sort and group columns please?  Thanks.

Ah, I missed the "client binding" caviat.  Shoot.  Thanks for the clarification.

I was about to reply that I found it and your demo verified how I was going to do this.  Thank you.

@InterSoft,

Would like to see an ITemplate implementation for the row checker so we can add our own checker to the column header.  Getting around this by inserting controls via javascript is not an elegant solution and can easily break if the object collections change.