So I’m using a ListView and I really want to use declaritive markup to crank out data that’s already defined in helper methods on the object. For example, if I’ve got a ListView bound to a list of “Project” objects, and I have a method called “GetFormalProjName” which is defined on that “Project” class, how can I hit that method from inside the ListView’s ItemTemplate?
It seems like its easy to hit any child objects of my bound “Project” object, and I can even hit those child objects’ methods with too much trouble (see below):
<%# ((EmpCoreView)Eval("EmpCoreView")).GetFullName() %>
In the above case, “EmpCoreView” is a child object of the “Project” object that’s the source of this Item of the listView. As you can see, I can get to the methods of the EmpCoreView object (“GetFullName()” is a method on object “EmpCoreView”). But for methods that are on the “Project” object, I can’t seem to get the syntax right to get to them. I tried using “this” like below:
<%# ((Project)Eval("this")).GetFormalProjName() %>
But this fails as ‘this’ refers to the ASPX page. So, if I can get to my data bound objects sub-objects and all their methods, then how do I get the data bound object’s methods?
And I know how to do this with code, I just want to do it declaratively and figure there’s got to be a way that I’m just missing. Thanks!
I think you can refer to Container.DataItem to refer to the “this” pointer you attempted to do: http://weblogs.asp.net/rajbk/archive/2004/07/20/what-s-the-deal-with-databinder-eval-and-container-dataitem.aspx
Once you cast the root object, you can drill down through properties and methods.