How to access controls in  HeaderTemplate and FooterTemplate in ASP .NET

We are using ASP .NET, C# here in this example.

Lets take this repeater as an example.

<asp:Repeater ID=”rpt” runat=”server”>
<HeaderTemplate>
<asp:CheckBox ID=”chk1″ runat=”server” />
</HeaderTemplate>
<ItemTemplate>
HELLO
</ItemTemplate>
<FooterTemplate>
<asp:CheckBox ID=”chk2″ runat=”server” />
</FooterTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>

You can access the header and footer item controls on ItemCreated or even ItemDataBound. But not when you iterate through the repeater items like this:

foreach(RepeaterItem ri in rpt.Items)

{
if (ri.ItemType == ListItemType.Header)
{
CheckBox chk1 = (CheckBox)ri.FindControl(“chk1″);

chk1.Checked=true;
}
if (ri.ItemType == ListItemType.Footer)
{
CheckBox chk2 = (CheckBox)ri.FindControl(“chk2″);

chk2.Checked=true;
}
}

This will simply not work.

Without going through the explanation why it does not work, let see how we can get it work.

If you have a footer and header template defined in the repeater, header is item with index 0 and footer is the last item. Bearing that in mind, we can simply access the header and footer controls as follows:

CheckBox chk1 = (CheckBox)rpt.Controls[0].FindControl(“chk1″);
chk1.Checked = true;
CheckBox chk2 = (CheckBox)rpt.Controls[rpt.Controls.Count - 1].FindControl(“chk2″);
chk2.Checked = true;