ASP.NET: How To Use BulkEditGridview To Save Hours In Database Editing

The GridView is a fantastic, versatile, and powerful tool. Unfortunately, it is also unrealistic in several aspects. Say you have a page in your website’s administrative back-end that is to update all of your prices for your products. With a typical GridView, if you wanted to update, say, 10 of these prices, you will require at minimum 20 postbacks, which depending on the speed of your server can be a lengthy process. Now imagine that you have over 1000 lines to edit. 2000 postbacks, minimum… sound like a daunting task that may take you hours in just waiting for your server to respond?

What if I told you that you could edit an unlimited number of records in a GridView with one click, one postback, and one call to your database, and that only the records you modified would be updated? What if I told you it was way, way easier than you think? You may think I am crazy at first if you have any experience with GridViews, but let me introduce you to the panacea of GridView woes, a little tool created by Matt Dotson called BulkEditGridView (more recently moved to this location on CodePlex). I have implemented this tool into nearly every editing application I have that requires a GridView and it has shaved not minutes or hours, but days of off time waiting for the server to post back.

I have been using this tool for quite some time now, but have waited until I had a full understanding of its power and nuances before I posted about it.  The links I provided you will give you more background on the why and how its production came about (and where to download it), but the documentation on its use is a bit on the scattered side. That’s where I come in!

To give you a bit of perspective, the BulkEditGridView is little more than a custom user control that inherits the GridView. However, the functionality it provides is considered more “real world applicable”, because on binding, it places every row in the GridView in Edit mode automatically. You may then either tab through columns or click through records you wish to edit, and then once you’re done with ALL your editing, you click your designated save button and everything is updated! It also knows which rows were edited and stores them in a Generics List Of(GridViewRow) called DirtyRows, which can be accessed programmatically.

Enough already, you say. How do I use it? Here’s a step-by-step of how I have implemented it. Please note that this is how I have implemented it. There may be better ways, but this is how it has worked for me. In this documentation, I am going to assume you have downloaded and installed the .dll for this control.

Step 1: Add BulkEditGridView to your .aspx page

Remember, it is essentially a GridView, so add it like you would to any other page. You may specify bound columns, template columns, or anything of the like the same way you would a regular GridView. The only extra property you must specify is the SaveButtonId property. This is just a button you have placed on your page that when pressed will make the BulkEditGridView work its magic.

Step 2: Add Save Button to page

As mentioned in the previous step, the BulkEditGridView requires that you specify which button is to be pressed for it to run. Any codebehind for this button is not required, but I typically add some catch-all code for when no edits have been made:

Protected Sub btnSaveChanges_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
	If BulkEditGridView1.DirtyRows.Count = 0 Then
		litMsg.Text = "No bulk updates made."
	End If
End Sub

Step 3: Define your RowUpdating Event Handler

This is where all the magic happens. When your Save Button is pressed, if you have any DirtyRows the RowUpdating event will fire for each row in that collection. You should create your RowUpdating event the same way you would for a regular GridView, but include the following modifications:

1. Declare a Static counter variable (Static count As Integer), and immediately increment it at the beginning of your event handler. This will come in handy later.

2. Declare a Static sql string variable (Static sql As String) or System.Text.StringBuilder if you are looking to optimize. This is where you will store all of your UPDATE strings for your database so that once you have iterated through all your rows, you may send them to your database to be run all at once. In other words, rather than update your database every time the RowUpdating event is called, return the sql string from your update function that you would typically run and add it on to a growing string of calls to make.

3. At the end of the RowUpdating event, include some conditional code like:

   If count = BulkEditGridView1.DirtyRows.Count Then
   	Dim rowIndexes As New StringBuilder
   	For Each row As GridViewRow In BulkEditGridView1.DirtyRows	'find out which rows were updated
   		rowIndexes.Append(row.RowIndex + 1 & ", " ) 'real count, not 0 based
   	Next
   	rowIndexes.Remove(rowIndexes.Length - 2, 2)	'get rid of final comma
   	msg = "Rows " & rowIndexes.ToString & " have been updated."
   	AddOrUpdateData(sql.ToString) 'your function to call your database
   	BindGridView() 'your function to bind your GridView
   	litMsg.Text = msg
   End If
   

   The preceding code does four things: it checks to see if it has completed running the RowUpdating for each modified row (remember that static count variable?), it iterates back through the DirtyRows so that you may relay back to the user which rows were updated, it updates your database using one call (the AddOrUpdateData function, which is however you call your database to make updates), and it re-binds your GridView. NOTE: when building your SQL string, remember to end your separate UPDATE commands with a semicolon!

Some notes to consider:

• If you are using template fields, do NOT include controls you wish to modify (textboxes, etc) inside of a Panel control. For some reason it will not detect them. What I did to get around this (if I wanted to display a panel on RowDataBound based on a variable, for instance) is I created two Literals: one where I would want to place the <div style="display:none;"> and one for the closing div tag.

• At least for me, Intellisense doesn’t work for the BulkEditGridView in the .aspx sourcecode edit mode, so either know your stuff or drop a regular GridView into your page first, build it the way you want, and then copy and paste the guts into a BulkEditGridView once you’re done.

• Once you update all your items and rebind your BulkEditGridView, it will show up again in edit mode. To toggle this “Bulk Edit” mode, I have sometimes created one BulkEditGridView and one normal GridView on the same page, and then a button to bind and show one and hide the other. For me it has created a seamless user experience and only costs you one postback.

And that’s it! I know this is a long post, but when you get used to using this amazing control, you will see that it boils down to only a few different things you need to change to get it working for you.

ASP.NET: Issues with Generics

The introduction of Generics into .NET 2.0 was a huge improvement over the previous methods of aggregating objects. There are many, many new things you can do with Generics that could not be done previously, in addition to making harder tasks easier and more efficient. For example, I can take a Generics list of my own objects and bind them to a GridView and be able to use the objects’ properties as bound datafields! Something not possible before. However, they do, of course, come with problems of their own. For instance, for the novice to intermediate user, the concept of predicates and actions is enough to make your (my) head spin. And it seems like this is the most efficient way to find things, even though to me, it makes no sense. I suppose until I decide to really hunker down and attempt to learn how to use these features, I’ll stick with my For Each [whatever] in MyGenericsList ... Next code.

Here is where I come across my problem, though. One of my business objects has a Generics list of another object (AllPrices as List(Of Price)) consisting of prices and options. This is bound to a GridView, which displays all the properties. On update, I have all the properties of the selected Price object update, some numbers are automatically determined by various variables and business calculations, and then the object is matched up back to its appropriate item in my AllPrices Generics collection, and the GridView is rebound. This works wonderfully for all but one situation, which has me vexed and confused. Here’s how I match the item and recalibrate my AllPrices Generics list (in my RowUpdating event):

' "newPrice" contains all my price changes. it is of type PriceInfo.Price
Dim updatedprice As New PriceInfo.Price
		For Each updatedprice In Prod.Prices.AllPrices
			If updatedprice.PriceID = newPrice.PriceID Then
				updatedprice = newPrice
				updatedprice.UpdatePrice() 'updates the database
				Prod.Prices.AllPrices(Prod.Prices.AllPrices.IndexOf(updatedprice)) = updatedprice 'update AllPrices ****
				Exit For
			End If
		Next
		GridView1.EditIndex = -1
		BindGridView() 'rebinds the AllPrices Generics list to the GridView

What this code does is finds the matching object in the list by PriceID, updates it with the changes (updatedprice = newPrice), updates the database, and then re-inserts the object into the AllPrices Generics list. However, in one situation, I get an “out of index” error at the line with four asterisks (****), even though the database updates correctly. Logically, this doesn’t make sense to me, since 1) it is finding the object in the collection (it can’t get to that line unless it does), 2) it is updating the database correctly (I’ve verified this in my database), it just isn’t updating the AllPrices list!

What the crap?

Any help is much appreciated. Also, if you’ve experienced similar issues with Generics, please post them! Or if you have some normal, realistic way to use actions and predicates! 🙂

Status: Solved! (12/11/07)
Solution: I was making things way too complex, apparently. I was running two loops (the For loop and the IndexOf() loop) and trying to match objects to one another. Rather than include all this ridiculous complexity, I created a simple counter variable (Dim i As Integer) outside the For loop and just incremented it after the conditional statement runs (i += 1), and replaced Prod.Prices.AllPrices(Prod.Prices.AllPrices.IndexOf(updatedprice)) = updatedprice with Prod.Prices.AllPrices(i) = updatedprice. Now everything is gravy. Thanks to Nick Berardi for the tips!