Question

I have a question regarding construct HTML tags on back-end code (c#) in my ASP.NET application.

Let say I have a DataTable as below:

I would like to dynamically convert (using multiple foreach and if else condition) the DataTable into a form of ul and li as below:

Finally my expected output:

what is the best practice of achieve this?
Please help.

Thank you in advanced.

Updated:
I’ve found another alternative solution from this post How do I display non-normalized data in a hierarchical structure?

Answer 1

You essentially have a hierarchy of people (parent) that contain other people (children and grand children), so you could use a recursive function to traverse the children of a Person object. Something like this:

public class Person
{
    public IEnumerable<Person> Children { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Link { get; set; }
}

public class PeopleHtmlGenerator
{
    public string GetPeopleHtml(IEnumerable<Person> people)
    {
        return string.Format("<div>{0}</div>", GetChildren(people));
    }

    private string GetChildren(IEnumerable<Person> people)
    {
        StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
        result.AppendLine("<ul>");
        foreach (var person in people)
        {
            result.AppendLine(string.Format("<li><a href=\"{0}\">{1}</a></li>", person.Link, person.Name));
            result.AppendLine(GetChildren(person.Children));
        }
        result.AppendLine("</ul>");
        return result.ToString();
    }
}