Displaying GridView When No Data Exists
One thing thats midly annoying to me about the new gridview control is that it doesn't display the header row when there is no data. I would like to just have the header displayed like the original table with a single row saying something like "No records found". The grid has a property for emptydata text which doesn't look that great in my opinion. I have seen some people use the <EmptyDataTemplate> property to create a new table in there which isn't the cleanest solution. One way to get the gridview to display how you want is to create a custom control that inherts from gidview. Then you can override the CreateChildControls method to create a the gridview with the all the headers and a blank row with one cell and a text message. Here's how to do it:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Text;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
public class EmptyGridView : GridView
{
#region Properties
/// <summary>
/// Enable or Disable generating an empty table if no data rows in source
/// </summary>
[
Description("Enable or disable generating an empty table with headers if no data rows in source"),
Category("Misc"),
DefaultValue("true"),
]
public bool ShowEmptyTable
{
get
{
object o = ViewState["ShowEmptyTable"];
return (o != null ? (bool)o : true);
}
set
{
ViewState["ShowEmptyTable"] = value;
}
}
/// <summary>
/// Get or Set Text to display in empty data row
/// </summary>
[
Description("Text to display in empty data row"),
Category("Misc"),
DefaultValue(""),
]
public string EmptyTableRowText
{
get
{
object o = ViewState["EmptyTableRowText"];
return (o != null ? o.ToString() : "");
}
set
{
ViewState["EmptyTableRowText"] = value;
}
}
#endregion
protected override int CreateChildControls(System.Collections.IEnumerable dataSource, bool dataBinding)
{
int numRows = base.CreateChildControls(dataSource, dataBinding);
//no data rows created, create empty table if enabled
if (numRows == 0 && ShowEmptyTable)
{
//create table
Table table = new Table();
table.ID = this.ID;
//create a new header row
GridViewRow row = base.CreateRow(-1, -1, DataControlRowType.Header, DataControlRowState.Normal);
//convert the exisiting columns into an array and initialize
DataControlField[] fields = new DataControlField[this.Columns.Count];
this.Columns.CopyTo(fields, 0);
this.InitializeRow(row, fields);
table.Rows.Add(row);
//create the empty row
row = new GridViewRow(-1, -1, DataControlRowType.DataRow, DataControlRowState.Normal);
TableCell cell = new TableCell();
cell.ColumnSpan = this.Columns.Count;
cell.Width = Unit.Percentage(100);
cell.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl(EmptyTableRowText));
row.Cells.Add(cell);
table.Rows.Add(row);
this.Controls.Add(table);
}
return numRows;
}
}
You can download the code here. Reflector was helpful in seeing how grids were created in the framework as was Fredrik Normen's blog which always has great asp.net info. Everytime i search for asp.net problem, its usually covered on his site.