Question

I thought this would be simple, but I sure am having a lot of trouble doing this:

The title of this question may be a bit misleading. I don’t have to use a gridview. In fact, I know the GridView is probably not the way to go on this. I just didn’t know how else to title it. But, for now just consider:

I have a very simple class called Student. It has 4 properties: int ID string FirstName string LastName string Email

I want to keep a generic collection of these in memory (session state): List students;

Ok, now the problem: I want the user to create as many of these Student objects as they want. For displaying these I just want a simple table of some kind with the 3 textboxes on each row. I would like every row to have textboxes insead of labels so that any record can be edited at anytime.

When the user is finished created their student objects, then they proceed on to do other things. But, I am just having trouble finding a way to display the records this way. Do I use the ListView(3.5), html table, gridview, repeater, etc.?

How would you do it?

Answer 1

I would be inclined to use the ListView personally for this, since you can insert Rows with it. Your LayoutTemplate would be a table with a <tr runat=’server’ ID=’itemPlaceHolder’ /> in it. Your ItemTemplate would have your TextBox’s (and optional a save button per row. Then you could have an InsertItemTemplate if you need inserts as well.

Anywhere on the page you can add a button to Save all items by looping through the ListView.Item collection and calling ListView.Update(itemIndex, validate).

<asp:ListView runat='server' ID='lv' InsertItemPosition='LastItem' DataKeyNames='id'> <LayoutTemplate>     <asp:LinkButton runat='server' OnClick='SaveAll' Text='Save All' />     <table>     <tr>         <th>First Name</th>         <th>Last Name</th>         <th>Email</th>     </tr>     <tr runat='server' id='itemPlaceHolder' />     </table>     <asp:LinkButton runat='server' OnClick='SaveAll' Text='Save All' /> </LayoutTemplate> <ItemTemplate>     <tr>         <td><asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='firstName' Text='<%#Bind('firstName') %>' /></td>         <td><asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='firstName' Text='<%#Bind('lastName') %>' /></td>         <td><asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='firstName' Text='<%#Bind('email') %>' /></td>         <td><asp:LinkButton runat='server' CommandName='update' Text='Save' /></td>     </tr> </ItemTemplate> <InsertItemTemplate>     <tr>         <td><asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='firstName' Text='<%#Bind('firstName') %>' /></td>         <td><asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='firstName' Text='<%#Bind('lastName') %>' /></td>         <td><asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='firstName' Text='<%#Bind('email') %>' /></td>         <td><asp:LinkButton runat='server' CommandName='insert' Text='Save' /></td>     </tr> </InsertItemTemplate> </asp:ListView>  protected void SaveAll(object sender, EventArgs e) {     lv.Items.ToList().ForEach(li => lv.UpdateItem(li.DataItemIndex, true)_; }