Flow spits out a series of span’s and label’s with BR’s if you don’t specify RepeatDirection of Horizontal. And choosing Table gives you a nicely unaccessible table you can’t format easily. Because of these limitation’s, I have always stayed away from CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList controls.

My solution is to write my own RadioButtonList, but to spit it out as an Unordered List which I can style very easily horizontally or vertically, little or lots of padding, all with CSS.

I unfortunately have been forced to regress back to ASP.NET 1.1 and VB.NET for a little while until the company upgrades to 2.0. Hence why I wrote the following instead of writing a CSS Control Adapter.

Imports System
Imports System.ComponentModel
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Web
Imports System.Web.UI
Imports System.Web.UI.WebControls

Namespace MyControls

 <DefaultProperty("Text"), _
ToolboxData("<{0}:ULRadioButtonList runat=server />") _
, Description("Creates a RadioButtonList using an Unordered List.")> _
Public Class ULRadioButtonList
Inherits RadioButtonList

 Protected Overrides Sub Render(ByVal writer As HtmlTextWriter)

//"SBE 01/28/2007:  just in case...not sure if this is needed or not
Controls.Clear()

//"SBE 01/28/2007:  not sure why I am leaving quotes as a param...I was just undecided if I would ever need to use " instead of "
Dim inputFormatString As String = "<input id={0}{1}{0} name={0}{2}{0} type={0}radio{0} value={0}{3}{0} {4} />"
Dim labelFormatString As String = "<label for={0}{1}{0}>{2}</label>"

//"SBE 01/28/2007:  if user sets the cssclass, add it to the <ul> tag
If (Not MyBase.CssClass Is Nothing AndAlso MyBase.CssClass <> "") Then
     writer.WriteLine("<ul class="" & MyBase.CssClass & "">")
Else
     writer.WriteLine("<ul>")
End If

//"SBE 01/28/2007:  loop through the dataitems
For index As Integer = 0 To Items.Count - 1
     writer.Indent += 1
     writer.WriteLine("<li>")
     writer.Indent += 1

     Dim inputBuilder As New StringBuilder
     Dim labelBuilder As New StringBuilder
     Dim checked As String = ""

     If (Items(index).Selected) Then
          checked = "checked"
     End If

     inputBuilder.AppendFormat(inputFormatString, """", MyBase.ClientID & "_" & index.ToString(), MyBase.UniqueID, Items(index).Value, checked)
     labelBuilder.AppendFormat(labelFormatString, """", MyBase.ClientID & "_" & index.ToString(), Items(index).Text)

     writer.WriteLine(inputBuilder.ToString())
     writer.WriteLine(labelBuilder.ToString())

     writer.Indent -= 1

     writer.WriteLine("</li>")
     writer.WriteLine()
     writer.Indent -= 1

 Next

 writer.WriteLine("</ul>")

 End Sub

 End Class

End Namespace

Before I started writing this, I found a beautiful website SimplyGold who had already wrote something similar for the CheckBoxList. Thanks for saving me some time!

Now playing: Menomena – Muscle n’ Flo

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