Question

I’ve got a list of items in an order to show in asp.net — each item (row) will have 3 textboxes so the user can both view and change that piece of data (shipping cost, handling cost, price).

What would be one ‘recommended’ way to accomplish this? With a repeater, I assume I’d then have to loop through the form values on postback, and with a gridview control I’d have to override onrowdatabound and on Postback some other method.

I’m sure both would work, but what do YOU as a developer choose in this situation?

Answer 1

What I’ve done in the past is use data-bound GridView TemplateColumns:

<asp:GridView runat='server' ID='grdRoster' AutoGenerateColumns='false'>     <Columns>         <asp:TemplateField HeaderText='First Name'>             <ItemTemplate>                 <asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='txtFirstName' Columns='10' Text='<%# Eval('RosterFirstName') %>' />             </ItemTemplate>         </asp:TemplateField>         <asp:TemplateField HeaderText='Middle Name'>             <ItemTemplate>                 <asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='txtMiddleName' Columns='10' Text='<%# Eval('RosterMiddleName') %>' />             </ItemTemplate>         </asp:TemplateField>                                <asp:TemplateField HeaderText='Last Name'>             <ItemTemplate>                 <asp:TextBox runat='server' ID='txtLastName' Columns='10' Text='<%# Eval('RosterLastName') %>' />             </ItemTemplate>         </asp:TemplateField>     </Columns> </asp:GridView> 

Then, on postback (say, a ‘Save’ button click), you can loop through the rows in the GridView and pluck the values out of the textboxes:

foreach ( GridViewRow row in grdRoster.Rows ) {     if ( row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow )     {         string firstName = ( ( TextBox ) row.FindControl( 'txtRosterFirstName' ) ).Text;         string middleName = ( ( TextBox ) row.FindControl( 'txtRosterMiddleName' ) ).Text;         string lastName = ( ( TextBox ) row.FindControl( 'txtRosterLastName' ) ).Text;     } }