Question

I have a dropdownlist which is being populated by a sqldatasource and when I look at the HTML created afterwards there’s a lot of spaces in the value and text. This must because the length of the fields in the database is 50.

e.g.

The HTML is like this

        <select name="DropDownList1" onchange="javascript:setTimeout('__doPostBack(\'DropDownList1\',\'\')', 0)" id="DropDownList1" style="height:23px;width:148px;">
    <option value="IT  Dev                                           ">IT  Dev                                           </option>
    <option value="Marketing                                         ">Marketing                                         </option>
    <option value="HR                                                ">HR                                                </option>
    <option selected="selected" value="Finance                                           ">Finance                                           </option>
    <option value="Corporate                                         ">Corporate                                         </option>
    <option value="IT Support                                        ">IT Support                                        </option>

</select>

The controls source is:

        <asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1" runat="server" AutoPostBack="True" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource2"
            DataValueField="dept_name" Height="23px" Width="148px">
            <asp:ListItem Text="All" Value="%"></asp:ListItem>
        </asp:DropDownList>

        <asp:SqlDataSource ID="SqlDataSource2" runat="server" ConnectionString="<%$ ConnectionStrings:scConnString %>"
            SelectCommand="SELECT dept_name FROM depts"></asp:SqlDataSource

Can I trim the values in my sql, or the items in the dropdownlist after it has been populated?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can’t trim fixed length data. It’ll always be padded back out to 50.

So CAST then trim

SELECT RTRIM(CAST(dept_name AS varchar(50))) AS dept_name FROM depts

--other options, after comment
SELECT RTRIM(CAST(dept_name AS varchar(50))) dept_name FROM depts
SELECT dept_name = RTRIM(CAST(dept_name AS varchar(50))) FROM depts

Or fix it in the client code