Custom Pager for SPGridView - Part 1

The problem:

My customer requirement is that the web part has to have a gridview whose pager allows access to any given page, go to the next page, go to the previous page, and select how many rows are displayed per page.

The solution:

This seemingly simple problem is actually a little more complex than it seems. The issue is that SPGridView does not have an event that triggers when the page size changes. So, the first step will be to create a new class that inherits from SPGridView and contains the following three things:

1)  The delegate PageSizeChangeHandler;

2) The public event PageSizeChanged;

3) the overridden RaisePostBackEvent method which triggers the PageSizeChanged event if the event argument is "Rows$" followed by the number of rows (e.g., "Rows$5" for 5 rows.) The dollar sign is used as a separator to follow the guidelines for event arguments for gridviews:

Of course, there should also be a new class PageSizeChangeEventArgs (inheriting from System.EventArgs) with a public property NewPageSize and a public constructor that sets this property based on the argument constructor:

Now we have a gridview capable of raising a postback event when the number of rows to be displayed changes.

To be continued...