asp:repeater - headers at section change

Question

is there any way to bring up a subheader row at changes in a field in an databound asp:repeater control e.g.

Instead of

country | colour | number
uk | red         


        

Answer 1

There seem to be a few bugs in the dotnetjunkies code but I've found a much simpler solution here http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/140753.aspx

Now repeaters don't support grouping, so you have to do this on your own, but it's pretty easy to do. In the repeater above the following data expression is responsible for the grouping:

<%# this.RenderGroup(Eval("Group") as
string) %> 

The expression calls a method on the form to render an extra div tag. The code for this simple method looks like this:

string LastGroup = "@#@~";
protected string RenderGroup(string Group) {   
    if (Group == this.LastGroup)       
    return "";     // *** Group has changed    
    this.LastGroup = Group;    
    return "
" +Group + "
";
}

This code gets called for every item and it simply checks to see if the group has changed. If it hasn't nothing is returned otherwise a simple div tag is returned as a string to embed into the markup. I chose to send back the HTML but I suppose you could also return true or false and conditionally render a control in the Repeater which would make the CSS Nazis happier .