Accessing DropDownList inside GridView Control

In the last article Selecting Checkboxes inside the GridView Control we saw that how we can select single as well as multiple checkboxes. Checkboxes are not the only control that can be inside the GridView. You can literally place most of the controls in it. In this article I will show you how you can populate a dropdownlist which resides in the GridView control.

 

Introduction:

In the last article Selecting Checkboxes inside the GridView Control we saw that how we can select single as well as multiple checkboxes. Checkboxes are not the only control that can be inside the GridView. You can literally place most of the controls in it. In this article I will show you how you can populate a dropdownlist which resides in the GridView control.

Populating DropDownList inside the GridView:

There are various techniques you can use to populate a DropDownList inside the GridView control. The most simple is using the SqlDataSource object. Simply assign the DataSource property of the DropDownList to the SqlDataSource object through the smart tag and that's it. In this article we will be populating DropDownList using our custom method.

// populates the dropdownlist

public DataSet PopulateDropDownList()

{

SqlConnection myConnection = new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["MyDatabase"].ConnectionString);

SqlDataAdapter ad = new SqlDataAdapter("SELECT * FROM tblPhone", myConnection);

DataSet ds = new DataSet();

ad.Fill(ds, "tblPhone");

return ds;

}

Now let's see where we call this method.

 <ItemTemplate>
<asp:DropDownList ID="DropDownList1" runat="server" DataSource="<%# PopulateDropDownList() %>"
DataTextField="Phone" DataValueField = "PhoneID">
</asp:DropDownList>
</ItemTemplate>

Now let's see how we can iterate through the GridView and get the selected value of the DropDownList.

protected void Button2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();

foreach (GridViewRow gvr in GridView1.Rows)

{

string selectedText = ((DropDownList)gvr.FindControl("DropDownList1")).SelectedItem.Text;

str.Append(selectedText);

}

Response.Write(str.ToString());

}

We simply iterates through the GridView control using GridViewRow object and find the "DropDownList1" control. Than we perform casting the row into the DropDownList and accessing its SelectedItem.Text property.

I hope you like this article, happy coding!