BoundField Formatting

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If you have a GridView that uses BoundFields but does not display line breaks or a lot of spaces quite right here is a way to get around that. This example uses a GridView with one BoundField that uses a DataField of comments. The comments are stored in a database and entered from another page which displays the comments properly in a textbox with all the spaces and line breaks you intended. The trick to get a BoundField to show those items is to take the item and replace the \r\n with a <br /> and the spaces with &nbsp. Also you need to set the HtmlEncode property of the BoundField to false.

This example shows the data being returned to a DataView which is the DataSource for the GridView.

The GridView:

<asp:GridView ID="gvComments" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" >
   <Columns>
      <asp:BoundField DataField="comments" HtmlEncode="false" />
   </Columns>
</asp:GridView>

The code (assumes the DataView dv is already filled):

int i = 0;
foreach (DataRow dr in dv.Table.Rows)
{
   string comment = dr.Field<string>(6);
   comment = comment.Replace(" ", "&nbsp;");
   comment = comment.Replace("\r\n", "<br />");
   dv.Table.Rows[i][6] = comment;
   i++;
}

Tags: ASP.Net, CSharp