Question

I’m having an issue with trying to add a button to my grid. My GridView is first loaded with data in the PageLoad event.

I’m then taking the data in the first cell of each row, and creating a button that will link to a URL. To get the URL, I have to run a query with the data in the first cell as a parameter. I was doing this in the RowDataBound event at first, but hitting that query for every row was making it really slow.

So I decided to add a button that would retrieve the URL only when you clicked the button.

Here’s my GridView:

<asp:GridView ID="gvResults" runat="server"
    OnRowDataBound="gvResults_RowDataBound"
    OnRowCommand="gvResults_RowCommand">               
</asp:GridView>    

And my code:

protected void gvResults_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.Row.DataItem != null)
    {
        LinkButton lb = new LinkButton();
        lb.CommandArgument = e.Row.Cells[0].Text;
        lb.CommandName = "NumClick";
        lb.Text = e.Row.Cells[0].Text;

        e.Row.Cells[0].Controls.Add((Control)lb);
    }
}


protected void gvResults_RowCommand(object sender, CommandEventArgs e)
{
    switch (e.CommandName.ToLower())
    {
        case "numclick":
            string url = GetUrl(e.CommandArgument.ToString());
            Response.Redirect(url);
            break;
        default:
            break;
    }
}

The grid generates fine, the button gets added to the grid for each row. But when I click on it, the RowCommand event doesn’t fire, and the page just refreshes.

Does anyone know what the issue is?

Answer 1

Why use a dynamic button at all? You can easily put the linkbutton directly into the markup of the gridview (as long as you don’t mind using a template field) and there will be no need to mess around with the RowDataBound event.

Your markup would look something like the following:

<Columns>
    <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="SomeHeaderText">
            <ItemTemplate>
                <asp:LinkButton ID="lnkBtn" runat="server" CommandName="NumClick" CommandArgument= '<%# (string)Eval("dbValue") %>'  Text='<%# (string)Eval("dbValue") %>'></asp:LinkButton>
            </ItemTemplate>
        </asp:TemplateField>        
    <asp:BoundField></asp:BoundField>
    <asp:BoundField></asp:BoundField>
    <asp:BoundField></asp:BoundField>
</Columns>

---

Add breakpoints to the RowCommand event and make sure that you can hit the breakpoints.

The problem may lie elsewhere.

Also, make sure that you’re not databinding on postback.