Alrighty!
Well, I figured it out eventually, but I shalt explain! There was some pain with those handlers, as when my dropdown boxes populated, that counted as a change event. This caused said events to fire. When they fired, there was some relations established between each of the boxes, so that when one changed, anything below it changed as well to match the necessary category showings.
Normally, this would be a good thing [very good thing
] but since not all of the DDlists had populated yet, this resulted in a nasty set of null errors coming up right at the start. This was eventually fixed by putting the initial populating of the datagrid into a segment of code that had all of the indexchanged event handlers nullified for the moment.
famCombo.SelectedIndexChanged -= somethingsomething {sender e, }
and I will edit that one bit a little bit later once I can pull the code onto this machine and give correct syntax and whatnot
after the populating was done, I ended up using the above line, but with a += instead. This allowed all of the resulting event handlers that should have fired... to fire. This was a good thing, as everything became what it should be!
As for the question on datasets... I was referring to the generic dataset used when not specifying a physical datasource {IE through the menu up top visual studio} and thus not using the adapter that resulted. I usually code my own in the form of:
SqlConnection dbConn = new SqlConnection(connString); {connString is a variable in a global module}
sqlDbAdapter dbAdapter = new SqlAdapter("exec LoadProductData ", dbConn);
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
ds.Fill(ds);
return ds;
This results in me having one dataset, with 5 tables in it. What I was worried about in terms of logic was having to do a lot of foreach row... if the itemsubcategory = "example1" then show. If not, then don't. Apparently .rowfilter works wonders, but I was not aware of that particular function at the time of posting the original note.
At least my lab is done now