Multiple RenderAsHtml() / ctx problem

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 14:41:26 Z

Hi,
I have a web part which displays multiple lists using
SPView.RenderAsHtml() (I need to use the RenderAsHtml rather than adding a
ListView control since the list are not coming from the site the webpart is
on).
The problem I am experiencing is that the links on the item dropdown
menu on any of the lists refer to the last list that was added! . For
example if the web part shows 3 lists 'a','b' and 'c' then clicking "View
Item" on the first item in lists 'a' or 'b' will take me to the first item
in list 'c'.

After some investigation I realised this due to the fact that the links for
a list on page are based on a Javascript "contextInfo()" object which is
automatically generated for each list. And RenderAsHtml() always calls these
ctx1, so each contextInfo object is overwriting the previous one!

To solve this problem I replaced all references to ctx1 with ctxN, where N
is an incremented integer starting at 1000 (to avaoid conflicting with other
webparts) see code extract below:

Code Snippet

SPList list = web.Lists[list name];
SPView view = list.DefaultView;
lit = new Literal();
lit.Text = view.RenderAsHtml();
lit.Text =lit.Text.Replace("ctx1",string.Format("ctx{0}",N.ToString()));
lit.Text = lit.Text.Replace("ctxId = 1", "ctxId= " +N.ToString());
lit.Text = lit.Text.Replace("CtxNum=\"1\"", "CtxNum=\""+ N.ToString() +"\"");
phGrid.Controls.Add(lit);

N++;

This seems to work fine with one problem, for some reason when you hover over the column heading and click the down arrow the filter dropdown menu is no longer displayed.

If anyone knows how I can solve this, (or how I can tell the webpart server
side to create a new javascript contextInfo object for each list I want to
render I would appreciate it)

Thanks,

Nick