How to delete a row from a GridView using non-visible data?

Question

I'm writting a simple prototype front end using a GridView that is populated via function, rather than being linked directly to a SqlServer data source.

So I can delete a row/record from grid/underlying database I am currently

Setting the AutoGenerateDeleteButton = true
Displaying the unique record ids in the first column
Handling the RowDeleting event
Obtaining the id by getting the grid.Rows[e.RowIndex].Cells[idIndex].Text
Passing that number through to a function that does the deleting

This seems to be working just fine, but I would rather not display the ids to the users at they don't mean anything to them.

I tried setting the id column's Visible property to false, but this caused step 4 above to return an empty string - and so no record deleted.

So how do I store the hidded id number with each row?

Or am I going about this completely the wrong way?

Follow up to answers:

Thanks for both the answers, ended up going Eric's DataKeyNames way. For other people new to ASP.NET like I am, the steps I used where

Between the lines where I set the grids DataSource and called DataBind(), I added

grid.DataKeyNames = new string[] {"id"};
Then in the function handling the RowDeleting I got hold of my id using

grid.DataKeys[e.RowIndex].Value

Eric Z Beard · Accepted Answer · 2008-10-15 17:17:32Z

3

GridView has a DataKeyNames property. When you bind a data source to the grid, you set the DataKeyNames (usually with just one name, your PK field). You don't show the PK, but you can get to it from code-behind.

edited Oct 15, 2008 at 17:17

answered Oct 15, 2008 at 16:00

Eric Z Beard

38.5k28 gold badges102 silver badges147 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

1 Comment

Kon Over a year ago

Yep, DataKeys is the way to go.

tvanfosson · Accepted Answer · 2008-10-15 16:02:23Z

0

Visible=false means don't render on the page. What you want is either to make it a template field and use a HiddenField to hold the value or set the style on the control to "display: none;". This would be the case if the client side code needed access to the value for an Ajax call or something.

Otherwise use the DataKeyNames property as @Eric Z Beard suggests.

answered Oct 15, 2008 at 16:02

tvanfosson

534k102 gold badges703 silver badges801 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to delete a row from a GridView using non-visible data?

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related