Question

I know that you can use exclamation sign to bind array of simple types (like string) to GridView like this

<asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false">
    <Columns>
       <asp:BoundField HeaderText="Array Field" DataField="!" />
    </Columns>    
</asp:GridView>

But this doesn’t seem to be the case with DataNavigateUrlFields

<asp:HyperLinkField DataNavigateUrlFields="!" DataNavigateUrlFormatString="RoleInformation.aspx?role={0}" Text="Manage users" />

and I get following error:

A field or property with the name ‘!’ was not found on the selected data source.

Answer 1

Most people probably haven’t even know to use the ! field I suspect. When I read your question it actually made me remember that feature which I had read about but never actually used. With that in mind, I don’t think there is a way with that type of field because it was probably forgotten in the HyperLinkField implementation (just a guess). You could just do a quick conversion to named property and then you don’t have any issues:

Example:

<asp:GridView ID="grdTest" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false"> 
    <Columns> 
        <asp:BoundField HeaderText="Array Field" DataField="data" />
        <asp:HyperLinkField DataNavigateUrlFields="data" DataNavigateUrlFormatString="RoleInformation.aspx?role={0}" Text="Manage users" /> 
    </Columns>     
</asp:GridView>

Notice the field named data. Then to bind your array just do:

string[] testArray = { "1", "2", "3" };
grdTest.DataSource = testArray.Select(a => new { data = a });
grdTest.DataBind();

It doesn’t replace the ! directly but it is a simple solution to get around binding to simple arrays that will always work even when the ! isn’t implemented which it probably needs to be for each field type.