Question

I’ve an item template inside a grid which has a <asp:LinkButton/> inside it. I assign the text for the link button as

<%# Convert.ToString(Eval("Tags"))%>

Tags can have a string with multiple tags in it delimited by space. For eg. “sports”, “sports cricket”, “sports cricket sachin” are the examples of some possible tags.

I want to create a button for each tag inside the string. How can i create the controls (server control – linkbutton) dynamically during runtime inside the grid item template?

Thank you

Answer 1

I assuming the grid you are referring to is a data grid?

This tutorial has a great example. To summarise:

Add a Template column to your grid view in place of the link button column:

<asp:datagrid id="dataGrid1" runat="server" Width="792px" 

    AutoGenerateColumns="False" 
    CellPadding="0" >

    <Columns>


        <asp:BoundColumn DataField="id" HeaderText="ID"> 
            <HeaderStyle Width="190px" HorizontalAlign="Center" >
            </HeaderStyle> 
        </asp:BoundColumn> 


        <asp:TemplateColumn HeaderText="Tags" 
                     HeaderStyle-HorizontalAlign="Center"> 
            <ItemStyle HorizontalAlign="Left" Wrap="True"></ItemStyle> 
            <ItemTemplate> 
                <asp:Repeater ID="rptChild" runat="server" DataSource='<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "tags").ToString().Split(tagSplitChars) %>'> 
                    <ItemTemplate> 
                        <asp:LinkButton ID="linkChild" 
                        runat="server" 
                            CommandArgument="<%# Container.DataItem%>"
                            > 
                            <%# Container.DataItem%> 
                        </asp:LinkButton> 
                    </ItemTemplate> 
                </asp:Repeater> 
            </ItemTemplate> 
        </asp:TemplateColumn> 
    </Columns> 
    <PagerStyle PageButtonCount="20" Mode="NumericPages"></PagerStyle> 
</asp:datagrid>

Note that tagSplitChars should be defined in your code behind as:

 protected char[] tagSplitChars  = new char[] { ' '};

Clearly you can add an “onclick” handler to you link button as you need.

I have tested this with this code behind and it works perfectly:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

namespace Demo
{
    public partial class WebForm1 : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        public char[] splitChars = new char[] { ' '};
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            dataGrid1.DataSource = new List<dynamic>() { new { id = 1, names = "one single" }, new { id = 2, names = "two double" } };
            dataGrid1.DataBind();
        }

    }
}

---

UPDATE

If you are just trying to add a list of buttons, and have no other columns to display in your grid, you can simplify the solution significantly:

<asp:Repeater ID="rptChild" runat="server" > 
    <ItemTemplate> 
        <asp:LinkButton ID="linkChild" runat="server"> 
             <%# Container.DataItem%> 
        </asp:LinkButton> 
    </ItemTemplate> 
</asp:Repeater> 

Then in the code behind

        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            dataGrid1.DataSource = myTagsString.split(splitChars);
            dataGrid1.DataBind();
        }

Clearly you will have to access the data in your datatable manually to extract the string, haven’t done this in a while but from memory it is quite simple.