How to access control inside parent control? (asp.net c#)

Question

I have page with listview in it. There is label and dropdownlist in listview. I would like to access the text of label from ddlTags_Init() method. Code:

<asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server" DataSourceID="SqlDataSource1" 
        DataKeyNames="id_Image" onitemdatabound="ListView1_ItemDataBound">
        <ItemTemplate>
             <asp:Label ID="TagsLabel" runat="server" Text='<%# Eval("Tags") %>' />
             <asp:DropDownList ID="ddlTags" runat="server" OnInit="ddlTags_Init" >
             </asp:DropDownList>
        </ItemTemplate>
</asp:ListView>

Code behind:

protected void ddlTags_Init(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
       DropDownList ddlTags = (DropDownList)sender;
       Label lblTag = (Label)ddlTags.Parent.FindControl("TagsLabel");
       string text=lblTag.Text;
}

At the moment i am stuck with

Label lblTag = (Label)ddlTags.Parent.FindControl("TagsLabel");

Anyone knows what am i missing? Thanks, Jim

Answer 1

Assuming that there are more than 1 elements in the listview datasource, why don't you put your code in the ItemDataBound handler? I think that it should work.

Answer 2

Init is too early to get the bind value of Label. In other words, label value hasn't been bind yet.

Instead you might want to consider using ItemDataBound method.

<asp:ListView ID="ListView1" runat="server" 
     OnItemDataBound="ListView1_ItemDataBound" ...>
  ....
</asp:ListView>

protected void ListView1_ItemDataBound(object sender, ListViewItemEventArgs e)
{
    if (e.Item.ItemType == ListViewItemType.DataItem)
    {
        var ddlTags = e.Item.FindControl("ddlTags") as DropDownList;
        var tagsLabel = e.Item.FindControl("TagsLabel") as Label;
    }
}