Posts from Comments:QuickDataBind

You may have noticed that I don’t write on this blog much. But the thing is I do write a lot on the inter-webs about technical matters — I just don’t to it here. Usually, I find something interesting on someone else’s blog, and then write an improvement in the comments. So, my work goes to helping other people’s pagerank. I figure this has got to stop… To this end, I start a series where I turn comments I made on other blogs into posts on this one….

To start us off, a few days ago, Samer wrote about an extension method he created for ListView:

public static ListView QuickDataBind(this ListView myListView, object myDataSource)
{
    myListView.DataSource = myDataSource;
    myListView.DataBind();
    return myListView;
}

Now, this is all well and good. but why are we limiting ourselves to just ListViews? Many ASP.NET WebControl take a datasource and use that idiom. Why not make an generic extension method to handle all of them?

public static T QuickDataBind(this T myDataBoundControl, object myDataSource) 
    where T: BaseDataBoundControl
{
    myDataBoundControl.DataSource = myDataSource;
    myDataBoundControl.DataBind();
    return myDataBoundControl;
}

It’s still called exactly the same way:

   myGridView.QuickDataBind(myDS);

but now it can be used on ListViews, GridView, DropDownLists DataGrids, Repeaters or anything else that uses a DataSource.