{"id":587,"date":"2004-04-12T09:51:37","date_gmt":"2004-04-12T13:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.cephas.net\/?p=587"},"modified":"2004-04-12T09:51:37","modified_gmt":"2004-04-12T13:51:37","slug":"aspnet-data-binding-array-of-hashtables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/2004\/04\/12\/aspnet-data-binding-array-of-hashtables\/","title":{"rendered":"ASP.NET: Data-binding array of hashtables"},"content":{"rendered":"

Spent this morning in ASP.NET land working on a small modification in which I needed to data bind an array of hashtables to an <asp:repeater>. Looks like some other ASP.NETers had the same problem<\/a>, but the ‘solutions’ they offered didn’t seem to solve the errors I was getting. First, in the code behind, I had something like this in the code behind:
\n
\npublic Repeater events = new Repeater();
\nprivate ArrayList aEvents = new ArrayList();
\npublic void Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) {
\n  Hashtable event1 = new Hashtable();
\n  event1.Add(\"name\", \"name of event 1\");
\n  event1.Add(\"date\", \"5\/31\/2004\");
\n  Hashtable event2 = new Hashtable();
\n  event2.Add(\"name\", \"name of event 2\");
\n  event2.Add(\"date\", \"06\/20\/2004\");
\n  aEvents.Add(event1);
\n  aEvents.Add(event2);
\n  events.DataSource = aEvents;
\n  events.DataBind();
\n}
\n<\/code>
\nand then a standard repeater tag in my ASP.NET code:
\n
\n<asp:repeater id=\"events\" runat=\"server\">
\n  <ItemTemplate>
\n  Name:<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,\"name\") %>
\n  Date:<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,\"date\") %>
\n  <\/ItemTemplate>
\n<\/asp:repeater>
\n<\/code>
\nThe first error I got was DataBinder.Eval: 'System.Collections.Hashtable' does not contain a property with the name name.<\/code>, which means that the DataBinder uses reflection to find a property called ‘name’ on the current object in the iteration. This is a problem because obviously a hashtable doesn’t have a public property for ‘name’, it only has an associate array of values. The workaround, although I don’t know why this works, is to wrap the keys in a brackets:
\n
\nName:<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,\"[name]\") %>
\nDate:<%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,\"[date]\") %>
\n<\/code>
\nUsing brackets lets you use an array of hashtables as a datasource. Since this works, it might be helpful to add it to the Data Binding Expression Syntax<\/a> guide on MSDN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spent this morning in ASP.NET land working on a small modification in which I needed to data bind an array of hashtables to an <asp:repeater>. Looks like some other ASP.NETers had the same problem, but the ‘solutions’ they offered didn’t seem to solve the errors I was getting. First, in the code behind, I had … Continue reading ASP.NET: Data-binding array of hashtables<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cephas.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}