Download Sample Project

This is based on a question asked by one of my blog readers.

I have 2 datagrids. Each Grid has the same amount of columns and each grid has a select column as the last column on the right added from the "gridview/ edit Columns/ CommandField/ Add" sequence. The first GridView has the Select column as a Link The second GridView has the select Column as a button I want to be able to change the text for both the Link and button in cell(4), setting them to the value in cell(1) from the same row using the GridView_RowDataBound event. However, using "cell(4).text = cell(1).text" just overwrites the text value removing the hyperlink and button.

The behavior described in this question is as expected. When you set text of a cell in grid, it directly affects HTML that is going to be rendered. When you set text value of a cell, it means that you are setting innerText of the cell. The column that GridView creates for command fields (Edit, Delete and Select) are a (anchor) or button elements. So you can see what will happen if you set text value in that cell. It will wipe out those link or button controls and replace them with simple text string.

There are properties like EditText, DeleteText and SelectText for CommandField column in grid view. If you try to set these values using a server side method by passing it DataContainer object, you will get following exception thrown.

Databinding expressions are only supported on objects that have a DataBinding event. 
System.Web.UI.WebControls.CommandField does not have a DataBinding event.

After looking at the requirements, i realized that requirements are as simple as replacing text with value from another cell in the same row. There is no need for doing any server side tricks or things like that. I can simple put together a simple client side java script that will take values from cell 1 and put them in whatever cell I want. Abd I came up with this small javascript solution using jQuery. This small code snippet shows how you can manipulate GridView or DataGrid on client side using jQuery. Let me show you the client side javascript that I added on the page. Then I will explain what this code is doing.

<script type="text/javascript">
function updateCommandLinks() {
 var $gridTable = $('#productsGrid');
 var rows = $gridTable.find('tbody > tr');
 var slicedRows = rows.slice(1, rows.length - 2);
 slicedRows.each(function() {
  var cells = $(this).find('td');
  var cellElem1 = cells.get(1);
  var cellElem5 = cells.get(5);
  $(cellElem5).find('a').each(function() {
   $(this).addClass('commandlink').append(" " + cellElem1.innerText);
  });
 });
}

$(document).ready(function() {
  updateCommandLinks();
});
</script>

The above code may look little verbose considering you can write very concise code using jQuery. But for sale of explaining and debugging, I decided to make it little bit verbose. I am sure you can reduce it to half the lines of code that I have written.

The implementation adds a handler for document load event. In that event handler here are the steps it follows:

1. Finds the element that has id of productsGrid. In our case, that is HTML element ID of our grid view.
2. In the table, it gets collection of all the rows, identified by tr tag.
3. Since in my implementation I have header and pager, that adds three rows into the collection. One top row for the header and then the last row itself will contain another table that contains a row for paging elements. To keep it simple, I decided to use slice function to remove first and last 2 rows from collection. You will need to modify this implementation depending on your grid rendering.
4. It iterates over each row in the collection.
5. For each row it then finds all cells, identified by td tag.
6. In my case, I want to replace text in command links with text from second column. So I saved reference to cell at index 1 by using get function.
7. Then I extracted all elements with tag a from sixth column.
8. Then it iterates over collection of anchor a tags and appends text from second cell to text in each of the links.

I think that is a simple implementation that serves the purpose without making any changes on the server side. The attached project has the complete implementation for this grid. This is a Visual Studio 2010 project. But you should be able to copy the script from the page to your implementation.

Download Sample Project

While working on a car dealership listings web site, I was experimenting with inserting google maps into the data grid. The grid will show name and address of top rated car dealers in certain categories. And along side their information, it will show their location on google map. To accomplish this task, I needed the longitude and latitude of car dealership's address or location. Some time back in my earlier post Convert Address and/or IP address to Geo Location I described how you can utilize google map's api to convert a physical address to geo location coordinates. This is the same technique that I used in Backyardtweets to show tweets in a specified location. So use the google map api to get these coordinates and insert these coordinates in the java script.

Now that you have geo location corresponding to an address, your task is to insert that little piece of java script in each row of the data grid. The way google map java script works is that it requires a HTML element where it can insert the map image. So I inserted a div with unique id in a cell in each row and then passed that unique id to java script that is used to render the map. Add an event handler for RowDataBound event and there you can add the element and register a client script for map as well. Here is some code snippet that shows how this all is accomplished.

protected void OnDealerRowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
 if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
 {
	var carDealer = e.Row.DataItem as CarDealer;
	var divId = string.Format("dealloc_{0}", carDealer.Id);
	var mapPanel = e.Row.Cells[2].FindControl("mapPanel") as Panel;
	var div = new HtmlGenericControl("div");
	div.Attributes.Add("id", divId);
	div.Attributes.Add("class", "mapdiv");
	mapPanel.Controls.Add(div);
	string js = GetGoogleMapScript(carDealer, divId);
	ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript
	  (this.Page, this.GetType(), "_map_" + carDealer.Id, js, true);
 }
}

private string GetGoogleMapScript(CarDealer dealer, string ctlId)
{
 string loc = string.Empty;
 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(dealer.State))
 {
	loc = string.Format("{0},", dealer.State);
 }
 loc += dealer.Country;
 decimal longitude, latitude;
 GoogleMapUtility.GetGeoLocationFromGoogle(loc, out longitude, out latitude);
 dealer.Location.Latitude = latitude;
 dealer.Location.Longitude = longitude;
 return GetJScriptForGeoLocations(longitude, latitude, ctlId);
}

public static string GetJScriptForGeoLocations(decimal longitude, decimal latitude, string elemId)
{
 StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
 sb.Append("function initialize_" + elemId + "() {{");
 sb.Append(" if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {{ ");
 sb.Append(" var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById(\"{0}\"));");
 sb.Append(" map.setCenter(new GLatLng({1}, {2}), 13);");
 sb.Append(" map.setUIToDefault();}}}} initialize_" + elemId + "();");
 return string.Format(sb.ToString(), elemId, latitude, longitude);
}

The attached project with this post has all the implementation for this sample implementation. And this is a Visual Studio 2010 project. I have not used any 2010 specific namespaces or code in this implementation so you should be able to take all the code and move it into a VS2008 or VS2005 project. And you will need to get key for google map api use from google as well.