Question

Within a repeater control, is there a way of de-binding certain items before the page is rendered?

Currently we have a collection of items being bound to a repeater and if the item is not part of the current language, we hide the item.

I’m wanting to be able to do a count on the repeater and get a valid number back. A count that doesn’t also include the hidden items.

Is it possible to de-bind specific items perhaps in the ItemDataBound event?

Update

For each item in the collection we’re binding, we check the database during the ItemDataBound for further information about the item, such as language etc. This is currently stopping us from filtering the bound data before binding it.

Answer 1

I agree with the others answers – the best solution (for both performance and code clarity) is to redesign the page so that you can filter invalid entries out before databinding.

Most data sources don’t allow us to remove their items while ASP.NET is iterating them. For example, if you bind to a simple generic List<T>, and you remove an item while iterating it, the list will throw an InvalidOperationException.

In other cases, ASP.NET actually iterates a a copy of the data source. If you bind to a DataTable, ASP.NET uses a copy of the contents (the default DataView) rather than iterating the source rows themselves – you can remove items from the underlying data source while iterating, but it doesn’t affect the databinding operation.

If filtering the items in advance really isn’t an option, your current solution is fine: just hide the items! If you need to get the correct count on top of that, track the number of invalid items in your ItemDataBound handler and expose it as a page-level property:

if (IsInvalid(args.Item.DataItem)) {
    this.invalidItemCount++;
    // code to hide the current item
}