Question

How may one get information that was used to programatically generate asp controls?

For example, I pulled a DataTable of user objects from the database and have organized them on a page, listing groupings such as a list of employees directly under the employer for each employer. On the page, I list each user’s Username as a LinkButton. When I click one of these employees, I want to redirect the page (which is easy) and set a session variable to the selected user’s UserId (which seems not so easy). How can I pull this UserId value back? These elements are not hard-coded with nice names (as they are generated in a for each loop).

Code from comment below:

Dim lnkbtnPm As New LinkButton ' is my link button. '
lnkbtnPm.Text = pmDr.Item("Username") ' where pmDr is my datarow. '
lnkbtnPm.CommandArgument = pmDr.Item("UserId")     
lnkbtnPm.CommandName = "CommandNameHere"
panelToAddControlTo.Controls.Add(lnkbtnPm) 

Thanks 🙂

Answer 1

I think this is what you would use the CommandName and CommandArgument properties of the LinkButton for. Assign the user id as CommandArgument and a suitable string as CommandName and hook up the Command event to an event handler:

Sub LinkButton_Command(sender As Object, e As CommandEventArgs) 
    ' e.CommandArgument will contain the user id '
End Sub

Update

The problem is that the event handler is never attached. Use AddHandler to do that:

Dim lnkbtnPm As New LinkButton 
lnkbtnPm.Text = pmDr.Item("Username") ' where pmDr is my datarow. '
lnkbtnPm.CommandArgument = pmDr.Item("UserId")     
lnkbtnPm.CommandName = "CommandNameHere"
AddHandler lnkbtnPm.Command, AddressOf LinkButton_Command
panelToAddControlTo.Controls.Add(lnkbtnPm)