Hiding the hyperlink URL in a DataGrid

Question

Hi All,
    i am new to the development of .net iviews for the Portal.we have a table that consists of the links to the different reports, i am displaying this contents in a Datagrid using hyperlinkcolumn of the grid.when the user clicks on the hyperlinkcolumn a new explorer will open with particular report.here the problem is my manager dont want the url to be appeard at the bottom of browser when user places mouse over that hyperlink column.
  if any one can let me know how to hide the url, that will be very helpful to me.
Thanks,
Regards,
Murali.

Answer 1

Hi Murali,
I've often heard people suggest Microsoft built the DataGrid as a control for use in their demos to promote .NET - it's nice but not terribly useful in its native form. I'd probably have to agree with that point of view.
About the only way you can really achieve what you want is to catch the ItemDataBound event of the DataGrid control and add the relevant JavaScript attributes there. The ItemDataBound event fires as each item within the data source is being bound to the DataGrid, creating the contents of each row in the grid. With this event we're able to modify the HTML output as it's being created for output to the browser.
Note that the ItemCreated event does a similar thing and is fine to use in this scenario, provided you don't want access to the underlying piece of data being bound to the grid, because it's not available at that point. For this reason, I'd suggest you use the ItemDataBound event so if you need to add data-related information in later on (such as changing the status message to a text description of the link that's stored in your data source) you can.
Anyway, here's some sample code (written in VB.NET) that would do the trick; put this in your component's code-behind file:
    ' dgdTest is the name of the DataGrid control; change this to the name of your control.
    Private Sub dgdTest_ItemDataBound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As DataGridItemEventArgs) Handles dgdTest.ItemDataBound
        If e.Item.ItemType = ListItemType.Item Or _
            e.Item.ItemType = ListItemType.AlternatingItem Or _
            e.Item.ItemType = ListItemType.SelectedItem Then
            ' For each row that is output, add the onmouseover HTML attribute
            Dim cell As TableCell = e.Item.Cells(0) ' <--- change the index to the appropriate column index for your DataGrid
            If Not (cell Is Nothing) Then
                ' TableCell generated for the row of data exists
                Dim link As HyperLink = CType(cell.Controls(0), HyperLink)
                If Not (link Is Nothing) Then
                    ' HyperLink control added for the HyperlinkColumn exists
                    link.Attributes.Add("onmouseover", "window.status=' '; return true;")
                    link.Attributes.Add("onmouseout", "window.status=''; return true;")
                End If
            End If
        End If
    End Sub
You'll need to set the index on the <i>e.Item.Cells(0)</i> above to the relevant zero-based index of the column that's your HyperlinkColumn; I've used zero here as the first column in the DataGrid.
Note that we also check the Cells and Controls collections are valid objects to avoid a NullReferenceException.
You'll also need to change the name of the DataGrid control in the method declaration to the relevant name of your control.
Having said all this, have you considered other alternatives to the DataGrid? If you're just displaying data and not using the editing, paging or sorting features of the control, I prefer to use the Repeater. It gives you total control of the HTML that's output and would eliminate the need to stuff around with the ItemDataBound event in this scenario.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Mal.