I am not sure what the problem is, I have not had time to investigate.  However, I am not a fan of viewstate for almost anything, instead I re-bind all elements on each rendering of the page.  Is there a reason this is not an option for you?

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I would not make a db call (I was not aware that this was where you were getting the title from).  So we are left with persisting the value to the client, and round-tripping it with each page request.  Viewstate is an option (you can programmatically add the title to viewstate), or you could use the clientapi's RegisterClientVariable to roundtrip the data.

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