Thread: Accessing controls in the Footer of a datalist

Try following this example:

Code:

Private Sub datalist1_ItemDataBound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As DataItemEventArgs) 
    If e.Item.ItemType = ItemType.Footer Then 
        Dim l As Label = DirectCast(e.Cells(0).Controls("labelname"), Label) 
        l.Text = "New Text" 
    End If 
End Sub

Well, you'll have to use a different event then. See here for a list of events supported by the DataList:

DataList Events (System.Web.UI.WebControls)

The postback is not being fired by a button inside the datalist, so I can't add an event to it.

Basically I have a whole page of Policy Information. Part of this is a datalist containing details of the premiums.

The details of each premium can be changed and when the Page level Update button control is clicked it cycles through each of the datalist items and checks for any updates.

What I wanted to do was have the ability to Add a premium to the list, so I included this in the footer of the datalist. You click an Add button within the footer of the datalist and the various dropdown and textbox controls are shown in the footer.

Once these are completed, the user clicks the Page level Update button control and what I thought would happen was the footer would be included in the datalist.items collection and I could grab the details from the controls inside the footer and add them to the db. That way I could easily differentiate between an existing premium and a new one.

Hope that makes sense. Can you think of a way to achieve this?

I'm wondering if instead of including the details in the footer, I could Add an item to the datalist and have the Add details in this. What do you think?

<edit>Actually, I guess another option would be to have an "Add" button at the end of the footer, which the user has to click to add the new premium. Would I then be able to access the various controls, if the button firing the event is also in the footer?</edit>

Yeap, this sounds a lot like the issue with using GridViews. Users not only want the ability to to edit/delete items, they wanted to be able to insert new items (see here: Adding an insert row to GridView)

This might give you an idea on how to handle the DataList.

EDIT::

Here's an example using a DataList: http://www.dotnetspider.com/forum/Vi...ForumId=128096