How do I bind a WPF DataGrid to a variable number of columns?

Question

My WPF application generates sets of data which may have a different number of columns each time. Included in the output is a description of each column that will be used t

Answer 1

I've continued my research and have not found any reasonable way to do this. The Columns property on the DataGrid isn't something I can bind against, in fact it's read only.

Bryan suggested something might be done with AutoGenerateColumns so I had a look. It uses simple .Net reflection to look at the properties of the objects in ItemsSource and generates a column for each one. Perhaps I could generate a type on the fly with a property for each column but this is getting way off track.

Since this problem is so easily sovled in code I will stick with a simple extension method I call whenever the data context is updated with new columns:

public static void GenerateColumns(this DataGrid dataGrid, IEnumerable columns)
{
    dataGrid.Columns.Clear();

    int index = 0;
    foreach (var column in columns)
    {
        dataGrid.Columns.Add(new DataGridTextColumn
        {
            Header = column.Name,
            Binding = new Binding(string.Format("[{0}]", index++))
        });
    }
}

// E.g. myGrid.GenerateColumns(schema);