GridView Sorting Trick when using Object Datasource with custom objects

When you are using Object DataSource in ASP.Net for GridView, if your select method is returning an object that is of type DataView, DataTable or DataSet, you will be able to get sorting automatically.
But if you are like me and your architecture has a distinct DTO (Entity) layer, and you pass back and forth custom objects or generic list of these custom objects, then you are in less luck with GridView. If you
are binding GridView with Object Datasource that returns a List, you will need to implement your own custom code to do sorting.

If you google this issue, you will find different implementation that will point you to add a OnSorting event handler and more than one way to implement a custom sorting.

What my thinking is, since DataTable and DataView provides us the automatic sorting that we need, then why don’t we create
a DataTable from the List we have. We can do this elegantly using generics and reflection. Once we create a DataTable, simply pass back a DataView based on this table as return parameter from your Select Method of Object Datasource.

Here is the code for converting a List to a DataTable, (CustomObject is my custom object defined in my DTO layer)

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Reflection;
public class Utilities
{

	public static DataTable ToDataTable(List lst) where T : CustomObject
        {
            PropertyInfo[] propertyInfos;

            System.Data.DataTable table = new DataTable("GridViewTable");
            DataColumn column=null;
            DataRow row=null;

            foreach (CustomObject v in lst)
            {
                propertyInfos = v.GetType().GetProperties();
                foreach (PropertyInfo propertyInfo in propertyInfos)
                {
                    column = new DataColumn();
                    column.DataType = System.Type.GetType(propertyInfo.PropertyType.FullName);
                    column.ColumnName = propertyInfo.Name;
                    table.Columns.Add(column);
                }
                //New table made, break the loop
                break;
            }
            //Now populate the table with values
            foreach (CustomObject v in lst)
            {
                 propertyInfos = v.GetType().GetProperties();
                 row = table.NewRow();
                 foreach (PropertyInfo propertyInfo in propertyInfos)
                     row[propertyInfo.Name] = propertyInfo.GetValue(v, null);

                 table.Rows.Add(row);
            }
            return (table);
        }

}

Cheers