Static DropDownList in GridView

« View all ASP.net articles

December 20, 2006

There are times when you want to limit the data entered in your GridView to preselected choices. Having a DropDownList in the edit state of your GridView can easily achieve this task.

This example uses a GridView with 2 columns from the "Article" table. The 2 columns are "Article_Title" and "Featured." We want to limit the entry choices the featured column to 1 or 0.

Our original GridView in edit mode looks like this:
  Article_Title Featured
Update Cancel How do you enable word wrap in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005?
Edit A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client..  
Edit How to Replace Text in ASP.net GridView  
Edit Remove Internet Explorer 7 and rollback to Internet Explorer 6  

Our first step is to convert the "Featured" column to a template field or as Visual Web Developer labels it: Convert this field into a TemplateField.

Edit the GridView's Columns
GridView Tasks - Edit Columns

Convert the "Featured" column into a TemplateField.
GridView - Convert this field into a TemplateField

The souce code for the Featured column is the following. We will replace the EditItemTemplate's TextBox with a DropDownList.

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Featured" SortExpression="Featured">

  <EditItemTemplate>
    <asp:TextBox ID="TextBox1" runat="server" Text='<%# Bind("Featured") %>'></asp:TextBox>
  </EditItemTemplate>

  <ItemTemplate>
     <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text='<%# Bind("Featured") %>'></asp:Label>
  </ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>
Our new code with the DropDownList. Notice that we simply added a DropDownList with 2 ListItems
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Featured" SortExpression="Featured">

  <EditItemTemplate>
    <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlFeatured" runat="server">
      <asp:ListItem Value="1">Yes</asp:ListItem>
      <asp:ListItem Value="0">No</asp:ListItem>
    </asp:DropDownList>
</EditItemTemplate>

  <ItemTemplate>
     <asp:Label ID="Label1" runat="server" Text='<%# Bind("Featured") %>'></asp:Label>
  </ItemTemplate>

</asp:TemplateField>
We achieved our task. The new GridView in edit mode now has a DropDownList that limits input to Yes=1 and No=0.
  Article_TitleFeatured
Update Cancel How do you enable word wrap in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005?
Edit A potentially dangerous Request.Form value was detected from the client..  
Edit How to Replace Text in ASP.net GridView  
Edit Remove Internet Explorer 7 and rollback to Internet Explorer 6