Getting Xml Columns from LinqDataSource to appear in a GridView

Question

I have a LinqDataSource and a GridView displaying a table. Columns of type xml don't show up. I'd like them to show up something like they do in Sql Server query outputs, with a link to display the clickable xml, though there may be another approach i'm not considering (maybe a styled display of the xml data, etc.). Two things i'd like to know how to do

• First, get the xml converted to a string, and display it in the table. Maybe the first 30 chars.
• Finally, style the xml into something useful, like a clickable link to display the full xml, or a sub-table, or a styled string.

So the following works, and displays a nice table, with edit and delete links. But Xml fields are missing. How would you go about adding support for the Xml fields?

<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
    <asp:LinqDataSource ID="OrdersDataSource"
        OnContextCreating="LinqDataSource_ContextCreating"
        runat="server" ContextTypeName="MyDbDataContext"
        EnableUpdate="True" TableName="orders"
        EnableDelete="true"
        OrderBy="Status, UserId">
    </asp:LinqDataSource>
    <asp:GridView ID="OrdersGridView" DataSourceID="OrdersDataSource"
        CssClass="gridview" PageSize="30" AutoGenerateDeleteButton="true"
        AutoGenerateEditButton="true" AllowPaging="True" AllowSorting="True"
        AlternatingRowStyle-BackColor="Beige" DataKeyNames="OrderId"
        runat="server" Width="705px">
        <Columns>
        </Columns>
    </asp:GridView>
</div>
</form>

Page_Load is empty at the moment.

Answer 1

The best approach would be to use GridView's RowDataBound event. This would look something like this:

protected void OrdersGridView_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
    {
        var dataItem = e.Row.DataItem;
        ...
    }
}

I'm not sure what the type of dataItem is, but probably you can cast it to your order type (easiest to see in the debugger, just set a breakpoint in the RowDataBound event handler). You should be able to get your xml data from this object. When you have the xml data, you can convert it to a string and get the first 30 characters, for example.

The last thing to do is set this text in the correct cell. See the example on MSDN for this.