Question

is there a way to store field from a DataList?

Such as

string year = Eval("date");

I want to do manipulation on the string year, and need to store it in the variable if possible!

Answer 1

If you’re using Eval, I’m guessing you’re doing work inside a databinding expression? If so, that’s generally the wrong place to do any actual post-processing of the data, but if you must do so, you should be able to explicitly cast like so:

string year = (string)Eval("date")

Or, if the variable isn’t a string type natively,

string year = Eval("date").ToString()

Better yet, add a function to your page that accepts an object parameter and does the processing like so:

public string DoSomething(object value)
{
    var year = value.ToString();  // or alterinately...
    var year = value as string();

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(year))
    {
        // do something to the year
        return year;
    }

    return ""; // default in case you can't process the value
}

Then, in your ASP.NET page, whenever you’re doing the databinding…

 <%# DoSomething(Eval("date")) %>