email a gridview

B.Harding — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:00:28 +0000

In this post I’ll discuss how I coerced a gridview control into straight text. The reason I did this was to send the data from the gridview in an email. An invoice in this case.

At first I figured I could use a div and simply tap in to the inner html. No luck! It’s not available on the server side. I’d like to avoid the help of Javascript so I kept looking.

I decided to make my own copy of text that is generated when the grid is databound. Every time a row is databound I append the info to my string. This turned out to be pretty flexible. I can pretty much turn the data into anything I want. csv, or a html table. At first I tried plain text with tabs in between. I decided to use an html table as it ended up looking the best.

In the grid’s row databound event I add

if the row is a header row. I close it with

if the row is the footer. For everyting in between I create a then for each control with

I saved this text in a hidden label that I can call later to be used in the body of an email.

Here is the source code. I use linq to poulate the gridview but you can bind the gridview to any datasource.

<%@ Page Language=”VB” %>
DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>
<script runat=”server”>

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)

If Not Page.IsPostBack Then

‘make some data with Linq

Dim myList() = {New With {.Name = “Bill”, .Title = “Developer”, .Age = “21″, .Birthday = “9/30″}, _
New With {.Name = “Joe”, .Title = “Tester”, .Age = “23″, .Birthday = “1/3″}, _
New With {.Name = “Tom”, .Title = “Senior Developer”, .Age = “25″, .Birthday = “3/20″}, _
New With {.Name = “Mark”, .Title = “Technician”, .Age = “41″, .Birthday = “6/26″} _

}

Me.GridView1.DataSource = myList
Me.GridView1.DataBind()

End If

End Sub

Protected Sub GridView1_RowDataBound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewRowEventArgs)

If e.Row.RowType = DataControlRowType.Header Then
Label1.Text &= vbCrLf & “

” & vbCrLf
End If

If e.Row.RowType <> DataControlRowType.Footer Then
Label1.Text &= vbTab & “

” & vbCrLf

For Each item In e.Row.Controls

If item.visible = True Then

Label1.Text &= vbTab & vbTab & “

” & vbCrLf

End If

Label1.Text &= vbTab & “

” & vbCrLf

End If

If e.Row.RowType = DataControlRowType.Footer Then
Label1.Text &= “

”

Label1.Text &= item.text

Label1.Text &= “

” & vbCrLf
End If

End Sub

Protected Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)

Me.Label2.Text = Server.HtmlEncode(Label1.Text)

Me.Label1.Visible = True

‘ Dim msg As New System.Net.Mail.MailMessage(TO@EMAIL.COM, FROM@EMAIL.COM)

‘ msg.Subject = “Gridview email”

‘ msg.IsBodyHtml = True

‘ msg.Body = Me.Label1.Text

‘Dim smtp As New System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient

‘ smtp.Send(msg)

End Sub

script>

<title>Untitled Pagetitle>

head>

<body>

<asp:GridView ID=”GridView1″ runat=”server” onrowdatabound=”GridView1_RowDataBound” AutoGenerateColumns=”False” >

<asp:BoundField DataField=”name” HeaderText=”Name” />
<asp:BoundField DataField=”age” HeaderText=”Age” />
<asp:BoundField DataField=”title” HeaderText=”Title” />
<asp:BoundField DataField=”birthday” HeaderText=”Birthday” />

Columns>

asp:GridView>

<asp:Button ID=”Button1″ runat=”server” Text=”capture this ^” onclick=”Button1_Click” />

<br />

<asp:Label ID=”Label1″ runat=”server” Visible=”False”>asp:Label>

<pre>

<asp:Label ID=”Label2″ runat=”server” Visible=”true”>asp:Label>

pre>

div>

form>

body>

html>

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email a gridview