Checkboxes and the Repeater

I used a repeater for the first time in my app, and in this instance it is essentially a list of people with checkboxes to the left of their names so the user can select one or more of them and perform an operation (like delete, etc.). When using a datagrid, this is really easy because you can bind the person’s ID as a hidden column, making it very easy to retrieve the primay key. This is not the case with the repeater or datalist as far as I can tell. To top that off, the asp:checkbox control does not have a value attribute where I could store the primary key, like the HTML version. But I needed the asp:checkbox functionality, not the HTML checkbox.

Again, this seemed like a common problem so I decided to perform a Google search. No good solution jumped out at me, until I read this thread from microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.aspnet.webcontrols. It is basically a guy griping about the lack of a value property for the asp:checkbox and a MS Rep apologizing for it. At this point I realized neither of these guys in the thread were “thinking in .Net” (and neither was I when I started my search). Everything is now object-oriented. If a class does not have a feature you need, add it! So that is what I did, and it works great:



Public Class RepeaterCheckBox
    Inherits CheckBox
    Property Value() As String
        Get
            Return CType(ViewState("value"), String)
        End Get

        Set(ByVal Input As String)
            ViewState("value") = Input
        End Set
    End Property
End Class


The important thing to remember here is to make sure the value is going into viewstate so it persists.