Develop Reference

To get values from custom control

In the below code I have user controls like textbox, dropdown, checkbox, etc. and I bind it to a datalist. Now I have refer the controls to .aspx web page now my aim is to get the values of custom controls in .aspx page. Please help me to do this. My aim is to get the values of textbox, dropdown, checkbox from usercontrols in .aspx.
GmatField.ascx
<asp:TextBox ID="txtField" runat="server" width="200Px" CssClass="style22" ></asp:TextBox>
<asp:DropDownList ID="cbField" runat="server" width="200Px" >
</asp:DropDownList>
<asp:CheckBox ID="chField" runat="server" width="200Px" />
GmatField.ascx
<%# Register TagPrefix="gmat" TagName="FieldCont" Src="~/Search/GmatField.ascx" %>
<asp:DataList ID="dlFields" runat="server" Height="100px"
Width="50px" BorderColor="Beige">
<ItemTemplate>
<gmat:FieldCont ID="gmatFieldCont" runat="server" />
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:DataList>
NewDocument.aspx
<%# Register TagPrefix="gmat" TagName="GmatFieldsControl" Src="~/Search/GmatFields.ascx" %>
<gmat:GmatFieldsControl ID="gmatFieldsContr" runat="server" />

Simple.
Create a public property that gets the value from the textbox or selectedItem dropdownlist
Then from the page that implements that user control, you can then access the property:
// usercontrol:
public string TxtField
{
get
{
return this.txtField.Text;
}
}
// from the ASPX page that implements the usercontrol:
string txtFieldValue = this.gmatFieldsContr.TxtField;

Display Listview inside another Listview's EmptyDataTemplate

Is there any way to display listview as another listview's empty data template. I just put it like following. But it wont display the listview or it's emptydata text. only displaying 'empty data first listview' text
<asp:ListView ID="searchResults" runat="server" ItemPlaceholderID="placeholder">
<EmptyDataTemplate>
empty data first listview
<asp:ListView ID="suggestions" runat="server" ItemPlaceholderID="placeholder" DataSource="<%#Model.SearchSuggestions %>">
<EmptyDataTemplate>
empty data second listview</EmptyDataTemplate>
<LayoutTemplate>
<span class="suggestionList">
<asp:PlaceHolder ID="placeholder" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder>
</span>
</LayoutTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
<%# Container.DataItem %>
</ItemTemplate>
<ItemSeparatorTemplate>
,</ItemSeparatorTemplate>
</asp:ListView>
</EmptyDataTemplate>
<LayoutTemplate>
*************
</LayoutTemplate>
</asp:ListView>

I copy and pasted your code and was able to get it to work by manually databinding it in the codebehind. The only modification I made to your aspx code was to remove the reference to the model, to simplify setting it up on my end. I have included my ugly/overly simple test code below.
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
searchResults.DataBind();
searchResults.Controls[0].DataBind();
}

Creating a repeater dynamically inside an accordion pane

My goal is to nest a Repeater inside an ASP.Net AJAX Accordion's AccordionPane.
So there is one Accordion which I am programmatically adding AccordionPanes to. The amount of panes I add depends on my particular dataset's count value, usually no more than 5. I've managed to do this successfully.
The thing I am having difficulty with is creating and adding a Repeater per each AccordionPane.
I've glanced over http://iridescence.no/post/Using-Templated-Controls-Programmatically.aspx but this is not exactly what I had in mind. Instead, I would rather declare a single Repeater as static HTML that I could then "clone" when I need. How can I achieve this? Obviously I would want each control's ID (within this declared Repeater) to be generated automatically each time i "clone" it.
The repeater looks like this:
<asp:Repeater ID="rptForum" runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
<div runat="server" style="border:solid #d3d3d3 1px; border-bottom-width:0px;">
<table width="100%">
<tr><td align="left">
<asp:Label runat="server" Font-Size="12px" />
</td></tr>
<tr><td align="left">
>> <asp:Label runat="server" Font-Size="12px" Text='<%# Eval("query") %>' />
</td></tr>
</table>
</div>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>
I might add more fields to be databound as I progress.
Any ideas appreciated..

You should be able to do that by adding the repeater to the Content template:
<cc1:AccordionPane ID="AccordionPane1" runat="server">
<Header>
Foo
</Header>
<Content>
<asp:Repeater ID="Repeater1" runat="server" ...>
...
</asp:Repeater>
</Content>
</cc1:AccordionPane>

You can do a hierarchical data bind with the accordion, as illustrated here: http://aspalliance.com/1674_complex_data_binding_with_the_accordion_control

Hilighting the current page in an asp.net 3.5 master page

In my project the master page contains a repeater that's used as a menu with an Xml file as the data source for the repeater.
<asp:Repeater ID="Admin_menus" runat="server">
<HeaderTemplate><div id="navmenu"><ul></HeaderTemplate>
<FooterTemplate>|</ul></div></FooterTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
|<li>
<a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "url")%>"
class="link6" id="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "id")%>">
<strong>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "title")%>
</strong>
</a>
</li>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>
urls in the xml file is as
<menuitems>
<item id="1" url="Employee.aspx" title="Employee" description="Employee" />
<item id="2" url="Location.aspx" title="Location" description="Location" />
</menuitems>
Here I want to change the CSS style of the current page in the menu.

One solution you can opt for is to handle the ItemCreated event of the <asp:Repeater> control. To do this you need to add an event handler:
In the .master markup:
<asp:Repeater ID="Admin_menus" runat="server" OnItemCreated="Admin_menus_ItemCreated">
<HeaderTemplate>
<div id="navmenu">
<ul>
</HeaderTemplate>
<FooterTemplate>
|</ul></div></FooterTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
|<li runat="server" id="hyperlink"><a href="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "url")%>" class="link6" id="<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "id")%>">
<strong>
<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "title")%></strong> </a></li>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>
In the .master.cs codebehind:
protected void Admin_menus_ItemCreated(object sender, RepeaterItemEventArgs e)
{
// Ensure that the ItemCreated is not null, the first one (header?) gets
// returned null
if (e.Item.DataItem != null)
{
// Extract the "url" attribute from the Xml that's being used for
// databinding for this particular row, via casting it down to
// IXPathNavigable as the concrete type of e.Item.DataItem isn't available
// to us.
var currentUrl = ((IXPathNavigable)e.Item.DataItem).CreateNavigator().GetAttribute("url", "");
if (Request.Url.PathAndQuery.Contains(currentUrl))
{
// This just adds a background color of "red" to the selected
// menu item. What you actually do is entirely up to you
var hyperlink = (HtmlGenericControl) e.Item.FindControl("hyperlink");
hyperlink.Style.Add(HtmlTextWriterStyle.BackgroundColor, "red");
}
}
}
Note that I've added a runat="server" as well as an id="hyperlink" to the <li> tag in your ItemTemplate so that the code in the ItemCreated handler can find it easily to style it.

Perhaps one solution is to check the current page in your inline Eval code and add the "currentpage" class to the anchor
For simplicity I'm using Eval() instead of DataBinder.Eval()
<asp:Repeater ID="Admin_menus" runat="server">
<HeaderTemplate>
<div id="navmenu"><ul>
</HeaderTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
<li>
<a href='<%# Eval("url") %>' class='link6<%# Request.RawUrl.EndsWith(Eval("url").ToString()) ? " currentpage" : "" %>' id='<%# Eval("id")%>'><strong><%# Eval("title")%></strong></a>
</li>
</ItemTemplate>
<FooterTemplate>
</ul></div>
</FooterTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>

Instead of binding directly from your xml data to repeater, try to get the repeater databing event, and compare with the current page url and the each binding item to determine if the current item should be hi-lighted

Specify an item placeholder by setting a control's ID property to "itemPlaceholder"

I have only single "Default.aspx" page and a single ListView Control. Why am I getting this error. Never Happened before
"An item placeholder must be specified on ListView 'ListView1'. Specify an item placeholder by setting a control's ID property to "itemPlaceholder". The item placeholder control must also specify runat="server"."
<%# Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="TesterConcepts._Default"%>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
</div>
<asp:ObjectDataSource ID="ObjectDataSource1" runat="server"
onselecting="ObjectDataSource1_Selecting" SelectMethod="GetItemsCollection"
TypeName="TesterConcepts.CutomDataSource">
<SelectParameters>
<asp:Parameter Name="items" Type="Object" />
</SelectParameters>
</asp:ObjectDataSource>
<asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server" DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1"
onselectedindexchanged="ListView1_SelectedIndexChanged">
</asp:ListView>
</body>
</html>
doing this was not helpful even
<asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server" DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1"
OnSelectedIndexChanged="ListView1_SelectedIndexChanged"
ItemPlaceholderID="PlaceHolder1">
</asp:ListView>
<asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder1" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder>
Now it throws this exception
"An item placeholder must be specified on ListView 'ListView1'. Specify an item placeholder by setting a control's ID property to "PlaceHolder1". The item placeholder control must also specify runat="server""

In ListView, Layout Template is the template which decides the Layout of the data display .
It should have an item placeholder tag with runat=”server” attribute.
Since the ListView's LayoutTemplate and ItemTemplate are each defined separately, we need some way to tell the LayoutTemplate, "Hey, for each record you are displaying, put the rendered item markup here." This is accomplished by adding a server-side control with the ID value specified by the ListView's ItemPlaceholderID property.
Ref - https://web.archive.org/web/20211020153238/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/122607-1.aspx
Hence U'll have to
1)Define a ItemsTemplate
2)Add a Placeholder in the LayoutTemplate
<tr runat="server" id="itemPlaceholder">
</tr>
or
<ItemTemplate>
<tr>
<td>
<asp:Label ID="MessageLabel" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("Item") %>' />
</td>
<td>
<asp:Label ID="URLLabel" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("URL") %>' />
</td>
</tr>
</ItemTemplate>
So the final Design will look like
<asp:ListView ID="NoticeItemsListView" runat="server">
<LayoutTemplate>
<table width="200px">
<tr>
<th>
Message
</th>
<th>
URL
</th>
</tr>
<tr runat="server" id="itemPlaceholder">
</tr>
</table>
</LayoutTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
<tr>
<td>
<asp:Label ID="MessageLabel" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("Item") %>' />
</td>
<td>
<asp:Label ID="URLLabel" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("URL") %>' />
</td>
</tr>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:ListView>

Inside your ListView you've to add a LayoutTemplate containing the PlaceHolder:
<asp:ListView ID="listview1" runat="server" ItemPlaceholderID="PlaceHolder1" >
<LayoutTemplate>
<asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder1" runat="server" />
</LayoutTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
...
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:ListView>

Looks like you need to define the placeholder element structure for the item elements which the query will return.
I'd suggest reading this article. A little old, but illustrates the concept.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211020153238/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/122607-1.aspx