Customizing the Data Modification Interface:
Step 3-Using a DropDownList for the Category and Supplier Editing Interfaces
This step of the VIDEO TUTORIAL will familiarize on how to display the Category Name and Suppliers Name fields in the editing interface of the GridView control. In order to accomplish this, the Category and Supplier bound fields in the GridView are converted to TemplateFields. Following which, two drop down lists are added to the corresponding EditItemTemplate Fields of the GridView. These dropdownlists are configured using separate ObjectDataSources which invoke the GetCategories ( ) and GetSuppliers ( ) methods from the CategoriesBLL and SuppliersBLL business objects respectively. For existing product information, the dropdown lists are pre-selected with existing CategoryID and SupplierID using the ‘databindings’ link from the smart tag menu of the dropdown lists. In addition, a separate list item as ‘None’ is added to be displayed in the dropdown lists to handle NULL values from the Products table in the database for existing product information. For detailed information and source code for this step, please refer to the original article.