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Howto: Make changes to DropDownList items values & display text.
- Visual Basic (VB.net) & ASP.net
For a recent project I am dynamically binding a DropdDownList to a datasource (in this instance, a DataTable returned from SQL Server).
The user needed to see a series of formatted strings (the index column) in the DropDownList but I couldn’t find anything on how to do this. The index returned from the SQL database held the item number and I needed to transform that into “No.:xxxxxx” with five digits of zero-padding.
My first approach was to modify the DataTable prior to DataBinding by adding a column with an expression:
DataTable.Columns.Add("FormattedIndex", Type.GetType("System.String"), "'No.:'+Index")
(The third parameter is the expression).
But the DataTable Expression property doesn’t have any functions for handling number-formatting.
The alternative and working solution was to modify the DropDownList via the DataBound method:
Private Sub DropDownList_DataBound(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles DropDownList.DataBound
'Rewrite text of items to include "No.:" prefix and 5-digit zero-padding
For Each Item As ListItem In sender.Items
Item.Text = String.Format("No.:{0:D5}", Integer.Parse(Item.Text))
Next
End Sub
And iterate through the ListItems being bound. One thing to note, many developers prefer to insert an item at index 0 with “Please Select” (as per):
DropDownList.Items.Insert(0, New ListItem("Please Select", ""))
This works fine with the above if DropDownList.DataBind() is called before the Insert()