ListItems attributes in a DropDownList are lost on postback?

Question

A coworker showed me this:

He has a DropDownList and a button on a web page. Here's the code behind:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (!IsPostBack)
        {
            ListItem item = new ListItem("1");
            item.Attributes.Add("title", "A");

            ListItem item2 = new ListItem("2");
            item2.Attributes.Add("title", "B");

            DropDownList1.Items.AddRange(new[] {item, item2});
            string s = DropDownList1.Items[0].Attributes["title"];
        }
    }

    protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        DropDownList1.Visible = !DropDownList1.Visible;
    }

On the page load, the items' tooltips are showing, but on the first postback, the attributes are lost. Why is this the case, and are there any workarounds?

Answer 1

If you only want to load the listitems on the first load of the page then you will need to enable ViewState so that the control can serialize its state there and reload it when the page posts back.

There are several places where ViewState can be enabled - check the <pages/> node in the web.config and also in the <%@ page %> directive at the top of the aspx file itself for the EnableViewState property. This setting will need to be true for ViewState to work.

If you don't want to use ViewState, simply remove the if (!IsPostBack) { ... } from around the code that adds the ListItems and the items will be recreated on each postback.

Edit: I apologize - I misread your question. You are correct that the attributes do no survive postback as they are not serialized in ViewState. You must re-add those attributes on each postback.

Answer 2

I had the same problem and wanted to contribute this resource where the author created an inherited ListItem Consumer to persist attributes to ViewState. Hopefully it will save someone the time I wasted until I stumbled on it.

protected override object SaveViewState()
{
    // create object array for Item count + 1
    object[] allStates = new object[this.Items.Count + 1];

    // the +1 is to hold the base info
    object baseState = base.SaveViewState();
    allStates[0] = baseState;

    Int32 i = 1;
    // now loop through and save each Style attribute for the List
    foreach (ListItem li in this.Items)
    {
        Int32 j = 0;
        string[][] attributes = new string[li.Attributes.Count][];
        foreach (string attribute in li.Attributes.Keys)
        {
            attributes[j++] = new string[] {attribute, li.Attributes[attribute]};
        }
        allStates[i++] = attributes;
    }
    return allStates;
}

protected override void LoadViewState(object savedState)
{
    if (savedState != null)
    {
        object[] myState = (object[])savedState;

        // restore base first
        if (myState[0] != null)
            base.LoadViewState(myState[0]);

        Int32 i = 1;
        foreach (ListItem li in this.Items)
        {
            // loop through and restore each style attribute
            foreach (string[] attribute in (string[][])myState[i++])
            {
                li.Attributes[attribute[0]] = attribute[1];
            }
        }
    }
}