SPGridView’s OnRowDataBound event returning nulls – Unable to FindControls

Earlier today I was just playing around with SharePoint 2010 and thought I should do a simple task with SPGridView, that is to display the data and show an appropriate image in the “Status” column instead of the text. Hmm, sounds quite simple doesn’t it! But no, it turned into a misery. Well, when I started it was quite natural to use the OnRowDataBound event on that to capture the data and do some modifications with the controls (I was using TemplateFields in the SPGridView by the way), so I did that and I tried  doing things like e.Row.FindControl(“xyz”), e.Row.Cells[2] and using RowIndex property which was returning -1 where e refers to an object of GridViewRowEventArgs and there was nothing to get over there. It was nulls all around!

So here’s a sample of the code in the visual webpart that I was writing:-

<SharePoint:SPGridView ID=”spGvWorkOrders”  runat=”server” >
<Columns>
<asp:TemplateField>
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:Label ID=”lbl_workOrderId” Text=’<% # Bind(“Id”) %>’  runat=”server”></asp:Label>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>

<asp:TemplateField>
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:Label ID=”lbl_workOrderTitle”  runat=”server” Text=’<% # Bind(“Title”) %>’ ></asp:Label>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>
<asp:TemplateField>
<ItemTemplate>

<asp:Image ID=”img_status” Width=”10px” ImageUrl=’<% #StatusToImage(“\”"+ Eval(“Status”)+”\”") %>’ runat=”server” />
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:TemplateField>

…

And here is the function:-

protected string StatusToImage(string status)
{
if ( ( rowcount++ % 2) == 0)
return “~/_layouts/Images/WorkOrders/add.png”;
else
return “~/_layouts/Images/WorkOrders/arrow_up_green.png”;
}

Notice that I had been using the Bind function earlier but when I tried using it to send the value to StatusToImage function it did not work. Eval is the better option anyway in case you’re just interesting in displaying the data.

So what I did was that instead of using the event I just put the function call inside the ascx code so that whenever a row is created that function is called with the value of Status from the Data Source and with that value sent to a function, we can return back a string to give the path to the image file. The syntax however, is quite tricky and it took me a while to figure that out correctly but it worked in the end. Hope it will save you some time though!

Unknown server tag ‘asp:ScriptManager’ After having AjaxControlToolkit.dll referenced

Yesterday I was working on a project which had the AJAX Extensions in use. It’s primarily a .NET 2.0 application and I had .NET Framework 3.5 SP 1 installed on my system. It was working normally and all of a sudden I got this error that: Unknown server tag ‘asp:ScriptManager’

It was strange because every thing was working and I had the reference to the AjaxControlToolkit.dll.

I found out that by adding the section below to the <system.web> node in the web.config solves the problem:-
<pages>

<controls>

<add tagPrefix=”asp” namespace=”System.Web.UI” assembly=”System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35″ />

</controls>

</pages>

Useful Regular Expression for a UserName

^[a-zA-Z0-9_\.\-]+$

Allows only Alphanumeric characters with a period(.), Underscore(_) and a Hyphen (-). No spaces or other characters allowed.

Regular Expression Testing Tool, The Regulator

I’ve found this tool called The Regulator, for validating and testing the regular expressions very useful.  I think some of you might find it fairly useful as well. The interface is pretty neat, very simple to use. In case you find it a bit confusing, press F1 to checkout the basics. It’s pretty much straight forward.

How to detect a mobile browser in ASP.NET

I’ve been having this issue with mobile development for quite sometime that I couldn’t get the mobile browser accurately by just using the Request.Browser.isMobileDevice property and I’ve found this piece of code here

Looks pretty useful.

public static bool isMobileBrowser()
{
//GETS THE CURRENT USER CONTEXT
HttpContext context = HttpContext.Current;

//FIRST TRY BUILT IN ASP.NT CHECK
if (context.Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice)
{
return true;
}
//THEN TRY CHECKING FOR THE HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE HEADER
if (context.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_WAP_PROFILE"] != null)
{
return true;
}
//THEN TRY CHECKING THAT HTTP_ACCEPT EXISTS AND CONTAINS WAP
if (context.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_ACCEPT"] != null &&
context.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_ACCEPT"].ToLower().Contains(“wap”))
{
return true;
}
//AND FINALLY CHECK THE HTTP_USER_AGENT
//HEADER VARIABLE FOR ANY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING
if (context.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] != null)
{
//Create a list of all mobile types
string[] mobiles =
new[]
{
“midp”, “j2me”, “avant”, “docomo”,
“novarra”, “palmos”, “palmsource”,
“240×320″, “opwv”, “chtml”,
“pda”, “windows ce”, “mmp/”,
“blackberry”, “mib/”, “symbian”,
“wireless”, “nokia”, “hand”, “mobi”,
“phone”, “cdm”, “up.b”, “audio”,
“SIE-”, “SEC-”, “samsung”, “HTC”,
“mot-”, “mitsu”, “sagem”, “sony”
, “alcatel”, “lg”, “eric”, “vx”,
“NEC”, “philips”, “mmm”, “xx”,
“panasonic”, “sharp”, “wap”, “sch”,
“rover”, “pocket”, “benq”, “java”,
“pt”, “pg”, “vox”, “amoi”,
“bird”, “compal”, “kg”, “voda”,
“sany”, “kdd”, “dbt”, “sendo”,
“sgh”, “gradi”, “jb”, “dddi”,
“moto”, “iphone”
};

//Loop through each item in the list created above
//and check if the header contains that text
foreach (string s in mobiles)
{
if (context.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_USER_AGENT"].
ToLower().Contains(s.ToLower()))
{
return true;
}
}
}

return false;
}

How to use an OR in a query in EntitySpaces?

It’s simple, yet not very obvious. All you have to do is to change the normal behavior of the commas you use in the Where function to act as an OR. You’d do it like this:-

ObjES.Query.es.DefaultConjunction = esConjunction.Or;
ObjES.Query.Where(<<Go ahead with using the commas that usually defaults to an AND conjunction>>);

oh and I almost forgot to mention my colleague Bilal mentioned this to me. So special thanks to him as well.

How to remove ReadOnly Attribute from a file?

Hello friends,

Here’s a nice little piece of code you can use to change file attributes of a particular file, its particularly useful when you’re trying to delete a read only file.

string savedCardFilePath = “My absolute file path”;

if (File.Exists(savedCardFilePath))
{
/*
* Remove readonly attribute off of the file if it exists before execution
*
**/
if(File.GetAttributes(savedCardFilePath) == FileAttributes.ReadOnly)
File.SetAttributes(savedCardFilePath, FileAttributes.Normal);
File.Delete(savedCardFilePath);
}

 

UPDATE May 14, 2012:

There have been some problems reported and better solutions given on this article so I updated the code to:

FileAttributes attributes = File.GetAttributes(file);

if ((attributes & FileAttributes.ReadOnly) == FileAttributes.ReadOnly)
File.SetAttributes(file, attributes ^ FileAttributes.ReadOnly);

Thanks for the feedback and sorry about the mistake

 

 

TinyMCE not working on IE 7

Happy new year folks,  09′ started off for me with a very strange bug. I was working on a form and decided to use TinyMCE in it for multi-line text editing and it was working A-OK in FF3, Chrome and Safari but not on IE 7. God that was a real pain in the butt going through all the javascript and I had absolutely no idea what was happening. It turned out that I had

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”../tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js”></script>

this line in both master page and content page. I removed one of them and walla! it started working.

I hope some of you folks might find this post useful some day!

Cheers.

How to use OrderBy() for multiple columns in EntitySpaces?

You can pass multiple columns in like this:-

collection.Query.OrderBy(collection.Query.ProductID.Descending, collection.Query.CategoryID.Ascending)

How to manipulate Session in Http Handlers

There is a common issue that you can’t manipulate session objects in http handlers, the files with ASHX extension Well normally you can read the contents in the session via context.Session but you can add/remove/modify that in there. So how do you do this:

The answer is simple: Just implement the IRequiresSessionState interface. It doesnt have any method to implement so you dont have to worry about any details, this just notifies the runtime that Session can be manipulated in this context. So your class declaration would look something like this:-

public class SetLabels : IHttpHandler, IRequiresSessionState
{

…