Question

I have a drop down list that is being used in an EditItemTemplate of a DetailsView, and it is being populated from a SqlDataSource, and I am binding the selected value as follows:

<EditItemTemplate>
    <asp:DropDownList ID="lstLocations" runat="server" 
         DataSourceID="sqlMDALocationsAll" DataTextField="loc_name" DataValueField="id" 
         SelectedValue='<%# Bind("staff_location_id") %>' AppendDataBoundItems="True" >
         <asp:ListItem Value="">(Unknown)</asp:ListItem>
    </asp:DropDownList>
</EditItemTemplate>

All works as expected. Now what I want to do is enable only those bound list items based on another column in the sqlDataSource – there is a “status” column that can have values of either active or inactive – and if the status of an entry is active, then I want the corresponding list item to be enabled, otherwise I want it to be disabled. The reason is that since this is an edit form, I don’t want people to be able to select a value that is inactive, but I need to include those “inactive” entries in the drop down list, since the main entry that is being edited could well have a location id for a location that is now inactive.

What I tried to use was the following atted to the DropDownList definition:

Enabled='<%# Eval("status") = "active" %>'

But that didn’t work – but there weren’t any errors reported.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Answer 1

You cannot perform a late-bound evaluation inside a webcontrol and within a data control like DetailsView.

Assign the value on ItemDataBound. Check out this similar question.