A few days ago while working on a project I had a requirement to display the GridView control with one of the columns as a hyperlink column. The AutoGenerateColumns must be set to true since the columns of the GridView were not fixed. Here is the code I used to create links inside the GridView as well as the Datagrid control.
<h3>GridView</h3>
<asp:GridView ID="gvCategories" runat="server"
onrowdatabound="gvCategories_RowDataBound">
</asp:GridView>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>DataGrid</h3>
<asp:DataGrid ID="dgCategories" runat="server" />
private void BindData()
{
SqlConnection myConnection = new SqlConnection("Server=localhost;Database=Northwind;Trusted_Connection=true");
SqlDataAdapter ad = new SqlDataAdapter("SELECT TOP 4 * FROM Categories", myConnection);
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
ad.Fill(ds);
foreach (DataRow row in ds.Tables[0].Rows)
{
row["CategoryName"] = ("<a href='#'>" + row["CategoryName"] + "</a>");
}
gvCategories.DataSource = ds;
gvCategories.DataBind();
dgCategories.DataSource = ds;
dgCategories.DataBind();
}
The result is shown in the image below:
As, you can see that the Datagrid displayed the links correctly while the GridView displayed the encoded links. The fix is pretty simple! Simply, override the behavior in the Row_DataBound event of the GridView control as show below:
protected void gvCategories_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
{
e.Row.Cells[1].Text = Server.HtmlDecode(e.Row.Cells[1].Text);
}
}
Now, if you run the application again the GridView will be displayed with links and *not* with encoded string.
