Hi all,

Let me say firstly, that i am very new to ASP (soon to become very obvious). I started out this current thing by following a tutorial to craft a simple trading post, by Michael Washington. And have since modified it to suit my purposes.

Basically, i have a datalist, and within each itemtemplate is also a "add link" button that displays (sets .visible = true) a form below the full data list. within each itemtemplate is also a Label containing the ID of the current record being displayed. How is it possible to transmit this ID to the form outside the datalist, it appears i have no "selected index" etc to work with when its a datalist.

This is probably wrong, but i took note in the sample, that a Class was built to hold the data for use, and connected to with an object datasource. Basically i have had to add a separate table, as entries in the main table, can have multiple related entries in the other table. I was not sure whether it was possible or advisible to modify the class to contain a ... sub class? and populate that in some fashion (or how to do so), so i simply created a separate class, and i populate it with the data for each entry in the main class... this is wher ethe problem is... the link between the Data in the main table is a foreign key ID in the second table, To populate my second class, and of course to run the insert to add to the 2nd table, i need to access the Correct ID from the original Class, to pass as the value for the foreign key (Where ID = @ID) etc...

Datalist doens't seem overly friendly in terms of indexing a selected data entry...

I apologise in advance if none of this makes sense, i haven't got much background with object oriented programing obviously, and am tackling it 'from the deep end' so to speak:). Any advice on how to achieve this is great, i figure i could use a postback to the same page, however i'd rather redesign the class structure than do that, it would seem the wrong way to go about it.

Any help greatly appreciated:)

William,

Many thanks for the assistance, using a CommandArgument assigned to the button within each 'item' in the datalist, i was able to pass the appropriate ID and apply it to a hidden field on the form that becomes visible. I tried to get creative, and move my form from below the datalist, to within the itemtemplate - this didn't work as i expected, however i've no idea how one would make it work - naturally i get a bunch of "theform" does not exist in the current context, i've no idea how it would be targetted as a result...it was only a thought to save scrolling down below the datalist to find your form.

My next drama, is a Page_load drama i think, of course i need to retreive my Datalist, as each datalist item is populated, i also need to retrieve from the second datasource the records with an ID = to the CommandArgument, any suggestions on this - i really have no idea and i think my poor class design may make this impossible?

Ultimately, the ID field for each item in the datalist needs to be used to extract data from another objectdatasource to populate a gridview within the datalist Itemtemplate... i will keep trying to come up with a way to do this - but do you, or anyone have a suggestion as to how to go about this?

Thanks again, charles