When a user completes an ad form, he is required to put a price in the textbox. Does someone know how I can I can change that requirement to an option? I would also like to change it to accept a text value such as "Best Offer" instead of a numerical value. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

In the Ads table in the db, the Price field does not allow nulls. There is logic (in the displaying of ads and searching by price) that depends on price not being null. It could be modified, but could be a bit of work. Maybe the minimal amount of work would be to add a checkbox field "or best offer" and then you can display that easily in Search page results. Your changes then are just additive.

Thanks Marcgel. I was hoping it would be something simple but after trying serveral different things to get it to work, all I did was get errors. I really appreciate your response. I'll see what I can do with your suggestion.

robin302:

Thanks Marcgel. I was hoping it would be something simple but after trying serveral different things to get it to work, all I did was get errors. I really appreciate your response. I'll see what I can do with your suggestion.

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Hello Robin302,

Have you found a solution for this. I am also interested in the solution. Pl. guide if you alraedy ahve solved this.

Thanks

My client wants to have an option to hide as he see fits.  I worked around the problem to treat $0 as the special case, in which I would display a custom message instead of the price.

First, I declare a constant in the Search.cs

protected const string CALL_MESSAGE = "CALL";

Then I add the two functions within the class:

protected string PriceToString(object price) {
   return PriceToString(Convert.ToInt32(price));
}

protected string PriceToString(int price) {
   return (price > 0) ? string.Format("{0:C2}", price) : CALL_MESSAGE;
}

In the showad.cs, I modify the AdDetails_ItemDataBound function to display the custom message:

protected

void AdDetails_ItemDataBound(object sender, RepeaterItemEventArgs e) {
   ...
   if (ad != null) { 
      ...
      AdPriceLabel.Text = (ad.Price > 0) ? String.Format("{0:c}", ad.Price) : CALL_MESSAGE;
      ...
   }
   ...
}

In search.aspx, I Changed the itemtemplate in the datagrid to

...
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Price" SortExpression="Price">
   <ItemTemplate><%# PriceToString(Eval("Price")) %></ItemTemplate>
...

Finally, you may also want to  change the label in the PostAd.aspx from price to something like "Price: (0 for CALL)", etc.

My solution is pretty much a hack. You may be able to find better solutions with similar idea. Please let me know if it works out for you.

Dear Himawari,

I just need a simple solution, perhaps more simpler than you mentioned above. I just need to remove the
$ Sign in price. So that it can be used in any country. I do not want any sign, not even Rupees or Pounds etc.

Everything else is  ok. I know a bit to make the changes like String.Format("{0:c}",
but i am not too sure where to make changes, anmd what to place there, and on which pages.
Can you guide me please.

Thanks

To remove the $ sign in Price, I think there are few places to change :

1) classifiedsdb.mdf : Open the Ads Table Definition and change the Price datatype from 'money' to 'int'

2) showad.aspx.vb : Change the format of 'AdPriceLabel.Text' to AdPriceLabel.Text = String.Format("{0}", ad.Price
<<sorry i'm not using C# but you should be able to find it in the code behind page of showad.aspx in C#>>

3) search.aspx :  remove the $ from DataFormatString in
 <asp:BoundField HeaderText="Price" DataField="Price" SortExpression="Price" DataFormatString="$ {0:F0}" HtmlEncode="False">