C# gridview nested in repeater update

Question

My current situation is to display an unknown number of Plantypes and within those Plantypes display a list of Participants(also unknown number), the participants have a textbox and a dropdown that is editable (you can't edit the individual rows, there is one update that does a bit of validation then updates all rows.)

I currently have a gridview nested withing a repeater, the repeater displays the Plan in a label and OnItemDataBound I call a method to populate the gridviews. It looks great, but I can't figure out how to save all the data at once. I'm not opposed to handling this a different way, as in loose the gridview and or repeater, if someone has a better idea.

This is C# and framework 2.0...there is no sorting or paging on the gridviews...just some links and the fields to update.

thanks in advance, Padawan

Answer 1

HTTP is stateless. Since a user physically can only update one record at a time you should implement some way to save as the user goes. This can be a simple as having a row focus and row blur events and do the saves using AJAX on blur(unfocus). Maybe make is modal as they edit so they cannot leave the page without saving.