Question

I’ve been thrown a problem regarding ASP and C# without any experience in either and on a server that I have limited access to and where I can’t see proper error logs. So prepare yourselves for a potentially confusing question 🙂

We have a loop (an ASP repeater) in a HTML template and a part of the HTML in the template should only be included in the first iteration of the loop. Unfortunately I can’t just hide the html for the other iterations, I need to remove it.

So essentially want to do this:

<% if (Container.ItemIndex == 0) { %>
    Lots of HTML here
<% } %>

Problem is this produces an error (and I can’t see the logs so I don’t know exactly why…). I know the if statement itself works (setting 0 == 0 instead works as an example), and I can get the index normally, just not here.

So the question is, how does one do something like this? Can I access the index in the C# if statement or is there something built into the repeater that I can use?

Answer 1

Rather than using an If statement, I would nest the “0 index only” content inside an ASP.NET Placeholder web control, and set visible=true only for the first item.

As @Amiram has stated, you could do:

<asp:Placeholder id="ph" runat="server" visible="<%# (bool)(Container.ItemIndex==0) %>">
    ...0 Index only content
</asp:Placeholder>

Alternatively, set visible="false" and change this value in the ItemDataBound event:

if (e.Item.ItemIndex == 0){
   (placeholder)e.Item.FindControl("ph").visible = true;
}