I've just had to fix a colleagues code, which had the same problem that I'd been struggling with yesterday - it's another one of those annoying quirks that has you tearing your hair out because you look at your code and even though it compiles it still wont work.

The issue was that we are trying to populate a dropdown list dynamically - using the c# funtion

dropdownlist.items.add("Text","value");

Although this does compile it didn't seem to work - I stand to be corrected. The way I got round it was to create a new listitem object and populate it with my text and value. i.e

dropdownlist.items.add(new ListItem("Text","value"));

Hope this helps somebody cus it's such an annoying thing to get stuck with - another point was that the value must always be a string - you can cast it when you retrieve it - (Convert.ToInt32(dropdownlist.selectedItem.value) but it seems to only want strings (I guess this is because the value is going to be rendered into HTML so any cast information will be obliterated anyway. A Little like the classic ASP Response.Write("Some HTML") used to work.

Blogged with Flock

It feels like the whole world is getting ready for Christmas, except me. I did all my shopping weeks ago, so it feels like a long wait - I get like this every year. Feels like I've given up waiting and it doesn't feel like Christmas, but I know on Monday evening I wont be able to sleep just like when I was a kid :0)

Merry Christmas Everybody

Blogged with Flock

I've had this problem a few times so I thought I'd actually get round to blogging it.

Displaying Dates on a Datagrid is a nightmare when you don't want to display the full date and time in dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm:ss format.

There is a useful little property in the datagrid items editor which allows you to specify the format of the string using {0:d} formatting.

The problem I've found was that no matter what I did, it didn't make a bit of difference to the output.  The solution after much googling was was set one of the other properties..

The trick is to set HTMLEncode to False - as if by magic it works.

Actually it's not magic - the reason it works is that by default your data is html-encoded before the string formatting is applied - switching off html-encoding stops this happening and allows you to format it how you wish - this post explains in more detail:

http://tinyurl.com/hx8jb

Blogged with Flock

Assumed consent is evil and maybe illegal