AzamSharp

A few days ago while working on a project I had a requirement to display the GridView control with one of the columns as a hyperlink column. The AutoGenerateColumns must be set to true since the columns of the GridView were not fixed. Here is the code I used to create links inside the GridView as well as the Datagrid control.

 <h3>GridView</h3>
    <asp:GridView ID="gvCategories" runat="server"
                onrowdatabound="gvCategories_RowDataBound">
    </asp:GridView>
   
    <br />
         
            <br />
    <br />
    <h3>DataGrid</h3>
    <asp:DataGrid ID="dgCategories" runat="server" />

 private void BindData()
        {
            SqlConnection myConnection = new SqlConnection("Server=localhost;Database=Northwind;Trusted_Connection=true");
            SqlDataAdapter ad = new SqlDataAdapter("SELECT TOP 4 * FROM Categories", myConnection);
            DataSet ds = new DataSet();
            ad.Fill(ds);

            foreach (DataRow row in ds.Tables[0].Rows)
            {
                row["CategoryName"] = ("<a href='#'>" + row["CategoryName"] + "</a>");
            }          

            gvCategories.DataSource = ds;
            gvCategories.DataBind();           

            dgCategories.DataSource = ds;
            dgCategories.DataBind();            
        } 

The result is shown in the image below:

As, you can see that the Datagrid displayed the links correctly while the GridView displayed the encoded links. The fix is pretty simple! Simply, override the behavior in the Row_DataBound event of the GridView control as show below:

  protected void gvCategories_RowDataBound(object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
        {
            if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
            {
                e.Row.Cells[1].Text = Server.HtmlDecode(e.Row.Cells[1].Text);               
            }
        }

Now, if you run the application again the GridView will be displayed with links and *not* with encoded string.