Question

I have a simple ASP.NET table like so:

<asp:Table id="tbl">
    <asp:TableHeaderRow id="header">
        <asp:TableHeaderCell id="hcell1" />
    </asp:TableHeaderRow>
    <asp:TableRow id="row">
        <asp:TableCell id="cell1" />
    </asp:TableRow>
</asp:Table>

The ID’s are made up and the actual table has several more columns. I want to be able to hide any column programmatically from the codebehind (not javascript). Is this possible? At this point I can easily change the markup to be pretty much whatever I want, so I’m open to suggestions.

EDIT: Sorry to be clear. I want to be able to simply hide a column in such a way that if I add a new row I don’t want to have to change any of the code that handles the hiding. The ideal would be something like:

tbl.Columns["ColName"].Visible = false;

Less ideal would be a for/foreach loop that did something similar.

Answer 1

Try using this extension method, it extends the Table class, adding methods to hide columns by index and by the ID of a TableHeaderCell (if one exists):

Note however, that it does not provide any logic to cater for columns which span other
columns:

Examples

tbl.HideColumn("HeaderID");
tbl.HideColumn(0);

Class

public static class TableExtensions
{
    public static void HideColumn(this Table table, int index)
    {
        foreach (TableRow row in table.Rows)
        {
            if (row.Cells.Count-1 >= index)
            {
                row.Cells[index].Visible = false;
            }
        }
    }

    public static void HideColumn(this Table table, string id)
    {
        int index = 0;
        bool columnFound = false;

        if (table.Rows.Count > 1)
        {
            TableHeaderRow headerRow = table.Rows[0] as TableHeaderRow;
            if (headerRow != null)
            {
                foreach (TableHeaderCell cell in headerRow.Cells)
                {
                    if (cell.ID.ToLower() == id.ToLower())
                    {
                        columnFound = true;
                        break;
                    }

                    index++;
                }
            }
        }

        if(columnFound)
            HideColumn(table, index);
    }
}