Hi,

 I'm very new to all this, so please bear with me...

 
I have followed an article by Scott Mitchell (http://www.asp.net/learn/data-access/tutorial-52-cs.aspx) to add checkboxes to a gridview.  That gridview shows all the user preferences available, and those preferences checked are saved to a user-preferences table.

My problem is that when the page loads, I would like to pre-select the preferences previously checked by that user.  Is this possible?  I'm also wondering if I should be using a checkboxlist instead of a gridview.

 
I'd be very grateful if anybody can point me in the right direction, even if it's just giving me the idea in plain english!  If anybody wants to volunteer some code, that would be even better!!

 
Thanks,

 
Neil
 

Ah, young padawan.  When you design your grid, bind your checkboxes to the various preference fields and set your datasource equal to SELECT whatever FROM wherever WHERE user_name = whoever.  Then do a GridView1.DataBind() in GridView1.PreRender().

And if you want to be able to scroll through all the users for your admin screen, if the admin login is used set your datasource to SELECT whatever FROM wherever and leave it at that.  Also, you'd want to set the template column for user_name to visible in that case, but you get good code sharing out of it.  Better than a checkbox list.

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for the reply.  I think I may not have given enough information in my first post...  At present, the gridviews datasource is SELECT preference name, preference id FROM preferences.  That lists all available options.  I can't seem to specify a different data source for the checkboxes, which need to be based on something like SELECT preference id FROM userpreferences WHERE userid = @userid.

I hope this makes sense, and that you might be able to help me further.  I'm also using the sqltableprofileprovider, if that's relevant.

Thanks again,

Neil
 

You;ll need to add a xref table to join your users to their selected preferences.  You'll also have to add a value field.  Lets think:

UserTable

UserId int
UserName varchar
+ whatever else you may want to know

PreferenceTable

PrefId int
PrefName varchar

UserPreferenceXRef

UserId int
PreferenceId int
PreferenceValue bit

Datasource for your GV in user mode is SELECT p.PrefName, x.Value FROM PreferenceTable p
                                                          INNER JOIN UserPreferenceXRef x ON p.PreferenceId = x.PreferenceId
                                                          INNER JOIN UserTable u on x.UserId = u.UserId AND u.UserName = @CurrentUser

I'm working on a stored proc that will build a horizontal datasource for your admin view.

 Thanks for your help Charlie - When you say admin view, are you referring to the asp.net admin pages?  If so, I'm not using the admin function for this, but looking to build the page from scratch - is that possible?

Thanks,

Neil 

Yeah, I'm working on flattening your table so that you get something like

              Pref1   Pref2   Pref3   Pref4
User1        1         0         0         1
User2        0         1         1         1

Maybe there's some smart SQL guy out there who already has that.  I'm trying to use a cursor to loop through the preferences... you know what, I need to make a temp table, insert the values into it and return that!

So you set your GridView to autogenerate the columns and boom.

Actually, I'll write a sp to generate a table-valued function that you can use as your datasource.  I know it seems like a lot of work but we just refactored a HUGE project here and we're checking into SourceSafe... and that's vvvveeeerrrrryyyyy ssssslllllloooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwww.....

And we can't do anything until its all done and this is interesting.

 Hi Charle,

 I really appreciate you taking the time to help me.  I'm not sure if the table you show in your last post is how the data will be presented or not.  If so, maybe it can be simpler.  The user preferences will only be visible to that user, so the end product will really just be a list of checkboxes. 

If I've misunderstood, please ignore me...

 
Thanks,

 
Neil
 

Yeah, that's it.  Just select on the current user name and you'll get their preferences as a set of bits that you bind to the checkboxes.  I think you can just set autogenerate = true and the gridview will set the checkboxes for you.  Pretty sure anyway.  I haven't had the chance to do autogeneration - we're all about code generation here.

This is interesting - an opportunity to use DSQL and there's no chance of SQL injection so no one out there can yell at me for recommending it!!!

meeting the wife for lunch - bb1hr

Hi Charlie,

I've managed to get what I need using a CheckBoxList control.  I hope you don't feel your time has been wasted.

Thanks,

Neil

 

OK, but how are you going to handle the admin screen?