Accessing Controls in ListView Templates

Today when doing some application building I came across a case where I wanted to embed a ASP control inside one of the template of the asp:ListView control. This is legal and simple todo, however it has some interesting effects. Since the control is embedded in a template it is not made available in the code behind file and in my case I wanted to be able to access the control in the code behind file. Here is an example of what my markup looked like:

<asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server">
<LayoutTemplate>
<table>
<tr>
<td><asp:PlaceHolder ID="ItemPlaceHolder" runat="server"></asp:PlaceHolder></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<asp:Button ID="ButtonTest" runat="server" Text="Button" />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</LayoutTemplate>
</asp:ListView>

I searched the Internet for a solution to this problem and many of the common solutions to the problem I found where to hooked to ItemCreated or DataBound event from the ListView, then using FindControl to find the control and store it in a variable that was part of the page class. While this is entirely doable it leads to really clunky code and there is a much better method for doing this. Controls have the same life cycle methods that the page itself has an by handling the Init event for the button I can get access to the button as soon as it is created and store a copy off that can be used when other parts of the page fire events.

Here is the change to the markup above:

 <asp:Button ID="ButtonTest" runat="server" Text="Button" oninit="ButtonTest_Init" />

And here is what the code behind looks like:

 public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page {
    Button ButtonTest;

    protected void ButtonTest_Init(object sender, EventArgs e) {
        ButtonTest = (Button)sender;
        ButtonTest.Text = "Foo";
    }

    protected void ListView1_ItemDeleted(object sender, ListViewDeletedEventArgs e) {
        ButtonTest.Text = "Add";
    }

}

The ButtonTest_Init event handler stores the button in ButtonTest and changes it's text. You will also note that because I've done this I can now access the button inside other event handlers the ListView may fire, which was my initial goal. All in a very clean manner not hooking ListView events and not calling FindControl.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 25, 2008
  PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2008/03/26/accessing-controls-in-listview-templates/

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2008
  This is the closest I've come to finding a solution to my own problem.  I have two labels in the listview templates.  I've bound data to these labels using the <%#Eval()> thingy.  The question I should be asking is how to get these bound values in the code behind.  

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2008
  Excellent work.  Your approach is infinitely easier (and cleaner) than littering one's code with FindControl calls.

• Anonymous
  October 19, 2009
  good idea, its better than findcontrol

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  Percect, thanks for this solution!

• Anonymous
  November 03, 2009
  Could you supply a VB  version of this code ?

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2009
  Excellent, thank you for posting! Took a lot of searching to get here - I was trying to populate DropDownLists within an InsertItemTemplate on page load and this cleanly solves the problem.

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2010
  Thanks, better than FindControl in many situations!

• Anonymous
  December 26, 2010
  thanks you!with FindControl i not access control inside <editItemtemplate></> of listview

• Anonymous
  July 18, 2011
  Wow.  This is so simple it's genious.  I never comment on these posts but what you have done here has relieved my soul avoiding that darn FindControl() method.  I love it! Keep up the great work!

• Anonymous
  December 21, 2011
  I know this post has been up a long time but... THANK YOU!

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2012
  It's 2012 and the post is still awsome!

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2014
  www.kettic.com/.../listview.shtml