sorting a gridview alphabetically when columns are codes

Question

hi there

i have a gridview populated by a Web Service search function. some of the columns in the grid are templatefields, because the values coming back from the search (in a datatable) are ids - i then use these ids to lookup the values when the rowdatabound event is triggered and populate a label or some such. this means that my sorting function for these id/lookup columns sorts by the ids rather than the textual value that i have looked up and actually populated the grid with (although i do put the ids in the grids datakeys).

what i want to do is top be able to sort by the looked up textual value rather than the codes for these particular columns. what i was going to do to get around this was to when the datatable comes back from the search, adding more columns the textual values and doing all the looking up then, thus being able to sort directly from the manually added columns.

is there another way to do this? as that approach seems like a bit of a bodge. although i guess it does remove having to do the looking up in the rowdatabound event....

my sorting function works by sticking the datatable in the session and on each bind grabbing the sort column and binding the gridview to a DataView with the sort attribute set to the column - and the direction.

thanks

nat

Answer 1

I dont understand why your datatable is stored in session, how many users do you have? Normally you should rebind your grid to the datasource on every particular event(sorting,paging,editing,...) but not on every postback(gridview is stored in viewstate).

Isnt it possible to get the textual values by sql-joins directly from database? Then you dont need your lookup in rowdatabound and you can set the SortExpression to that column.