Getting value from a cell from a gridview on RowDataBound event

Question

string percentage = e.Row.Cells[7].Text; 

I am trying to do some dynamic stuff with my GridView, so I have wired up some code to the RowDataBound event. I am trying to get the value from a particular cell, which is a TemplateField. But the code above always seems to be returning an empty string.

Any ideas?

To clarify, here is a bit the offending cell:

<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="# Percentage click throughs"> <ItemTemplate>     <%# AddPercentClickThroughs((int)Eval("EmailSummary.pLinksClicked"), (int)Eval("NumberOfSends")) %> </ItemTemplate> </asp:TemplateField> 

On a related note, does anyone know if there is a better way of selecting the cell in the row. It sucks putting in cell[1]. Couldn't I do cell["mycellname"], so if I decide to change the order of my cells, bugs wont appear?

Answer 1

why not pull the data directly out of the data source.

DataBinder.Eval(e.Row.DataItem, "ColumnName") 

Answer 2

When you use a TemplateField and bind literal text to it like you are doing, asp.net will actually insert a control FOR YOU! It gets put into a DataBoundLiteralControl. You can see this if you look in the debugger near your line of code that is getting the empty text.

So, to access the information without changing your template to use a control, you would cast like this:

string percentage = ((DataBoundLiteralControl)e.Row.Cells[7].Controls[0]).Text; 

That will get you your text!