Getting the bound field name at runtime

Question

If you bind a control in a FormView using two way binding (such as Text='<% #Bind("FieldName") %>'), how do you retrieve the field name "FieldName"? There are several things I want to do with this information; for example, I have a database table that contains a dump of all the field definitions from ERWin and I want to programmatically create some sort of context-sensitive help for each individual field (there are hundreds spread across dozens of forms).

This is pretty much an exact duplicate of a question asked a year ago but the answer didn't make much sense to me. First, the answer seemed to be for a GridView and not a FormView (e.Row.Cells[0] gave it away). Second, what does SortExpression have to do with anything? Third, it mentions an event argument, but for what event? In OnDataBound, EventArgs e is empty.

Answer 1

An easy way of doing this is to programatically assign the name of the data field to the Tooltip property of your Formview controls, then the data field names will be shown to the user as they mouse over these controls. If you want a more specific answer, please specify if this is what you are trying to accomplish.

Answer 2

you can get using follwing code...

protected void frm_DataBound(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (frm.DataItem != null)
    {
        hdfImageID.Value = ((DataRowView)frm.DataItem)["imageResID"].ToString();
    }
}

Answer 3

There does not appear to be any way to get at this information from a FormView, as the column name is not stored at the level you want it.

However, I must admit that I do not understand why you want to retrieve at runtime something that you know at compile time. Why is it not possible to just write the code you need? Even if you want your code to be more generic, you can create a dictionary of control names and their associated bound column names to pass to your class that does whatever it needs to do.

Regarding the answer to your last question - the GridView stores the column name in the SortExpression property, so that it knows what column to sort by when the user resorts the grid. Hence, in a GridView, you can access the column name through the SortExpression.