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DataBinding on ASP.Net

After consideration from a previous post, i decided to boldly test my new class designs by making those private instance variables public. Beyond struggling against my own niggles, i discovered that ASP.Net doesn’t like breaking PrivateInstanceVariableMandate either. Consider the DataBinder for example.

In your mark-up code, a “typical” repeater section might look like


The DataBinder.Eval however only evaluates properties of that object. Public fields [class variables] are not properties and so breaking with traditions and trying to make things simpler, proved to be more complicated down the line [on this framework].

With a little co-ercion, it’s easy enuff to write a FieldBinder


to allow code such as above. All of a sudden i can access fields and it’s all good. Now the pro’s and con’s of introducing FieldBinder into the system can be debated at length, but the beauty of this insight led me to an even more interesting possibility.


There are times when real-time data associated with an object needs to be retrieved. Making the function a property, in a no-argument case, again, is a design preference but can lead to problems since the property EmailCount conveys a different sentiment to the method GetEmailCount(). The method, for me in my current project, implies that more work is done to retrieve the value than simply looking at one of the already present values. So i really want to keep it a function but can’t bind to it using DataBinder.

Extending this idea further, you can overload FunctionBinder to accept specific parameter types or arrays of objects for the function arguments. How you do that, well, that’s your decision…

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