Joe Stevens' BlogEverything .NET and C#

I’ve been playing around with the ListView control recently and am quite impressed with it.  I like how it gives full control over the markup used as apposed to the other data driven controls.

I came across an issue where in my ItemTemplate I have a CheckBoxList which I needed to reference when I hit a button also in the ItemTemplate.

As the ItemTemplate repeats there will be many CheckBoxLists so how do I find the correct one?

The answer I found was in the ListView’s Items collection. On my button I set the CommandArgument to the DataItemIndex, then in my handler for the ListView’s ItemCommand event I used FindControl on the item matching the index.

Here is my item template:

<ItemTemplate>
    <div>
        <asp:Literal ID="lblForename" Text='<%# Eval("Forename") %>' runat="server" />
        <asp:Literal ID="lblSurname" Text='<%# Eval("Surname") %>' runat="server" />
      �
        <div>
            <asp:CheckBoxList   ID="cblRoles"
                                DataSourceID="odsRole"
                                DataValueField="ID"
                                DataTextField="Name"
                                OnDataBound="cblRoles_OnDataBound"
                                runat="server">
            </asp:CheckBoxList>
        </div>
      �
        <div>
            <asp:Button ID="btnSaveRoles"
                        Text="Save Roles"
                        CommandName="SaveRoles"
                        CommandArgument='<%# Container.DataItemIndex %>'
                        runat="server" />
        </div>
    </div>
</ItemTemplate>

And here is my event handler:

protected void lvUser_ItemCommand(object sender, ListViewCommandEventArgs e)
{
    try
    {
        if (e.CommandName.Equals("SaveRoles"))
        {
            CheckBoxList cblRoles = lvUser.Items[Convert.ToInt32(e.CommandArgument)].FindControl("cblRoles") as CheckBoxList;

            //Other code
        }
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        lblMessage.Text = ex.Message;
    }
}

So I’m using the FindControl method on the ListViewDataItem in the position passed via the CommandArgument which gives me the correct control.