Hello all,

I was wondering how I could develop a customized repeater control (as the asp.net one) but with the following feature :

instead of specifying <ItemTemplate> and <AlternateItemTemplate> and header and footer template, I would like to have conditional templates, defined (a first idea, but maybe there are some better ways to do it ... ) like this :

<asp:repeater ... >
   <template name="Car">
      <tr><td colspan="2"><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The brand of the car ... ) %> <td><tr>
   </template>

    <template name="Animal">
      <tr>
         <td><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The name of the animal... ) %> <td>
         <td><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The age of the animal... ) %> <td>
      <tr>
   </template>
   
    <template name="Person">
      <tr>
         <td><b><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The name of the person... ) %><b> <td>
         <td><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The age of the person... ) %> <td>
      <tr>
   </template>

</asp:repeater>

Well, this is a stupid example but as you can see, this way of "templating" a repeater let us specify different contents / styles to render according to some conditional statements... I mean, we would have to be able to define (maybe in codebehind, or any other solution i didn't invented yet ) to tell :

use the Template "Car" when DataBoundItem.Category = 1
use the Template "Animal" when DataBoundItem.Category > 1 AND DataBoundItem.IsAnimal = true
use the Template "Car" when DataBoundItem.Category = 1 AND DataBoundItem.IsAnimal = false
// and even define a "default Template" when none of the upper conditions where associated to a template ...

Well, that's a first idea but for now I haven't found any way to do that in an ASP.Net spirit (actually, I think about that needed feature because of migration of an ASP 3.0 projet, where we were always using <% for ...  %> statements directly in html code... where you can build you html in a loop in a simplier way than we can do it now with asp.net ...

Please let me know your opinion about that problem and maybe some advice on how to develop the idea of custom templates (haven't found any documentation yet .... ) or maybe a way to do it with existing components ... ( but with aspx support, not by doing it entirely in code behind ... I hate having to define html tags in codebehind as string variables ... that isn't the way I like to develop in ASP.Net ...)

Thank's all for your attention !

Mike.

---

-- Miketrix
Better to know much about nothing or to a little about everything ?

Hi Mike,
If you want do this with the out-of-the-box Repeater, you can do it like so:

<asp:repeater ... >
   <ItemTemplate>
      <tr runat="server" id="car" Visible=<%#(Container.DataItem("Category") = 1)%>>
         <td colspan="2"><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The brand of the car ... ) %> <td>
       <tr>
       <tr ruant="server" id="animal" Visible=<%#(Container.DataItem("Category") = 1 AND Container.DataItem("IsAnimal") = 1)%>>
         <td><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The name of the animal... ) %> <td>
         <td><%# Databinder.Eval( ... The age of the animal... ) %> <td>
      <tr>
  </ItemTemplate>
</asp:repeater>

You can still go down the path of creating your own Server Control with named templates, but this may give you some ideas.

Marcie

---

http://www.datagridgirl.com
NEW! http://www.gridviewgirl.com