How to set up page loading in ASP.Net for dynamic gridviews?

Question

Here is how my code is set up. The webpage itself works like this:

You have a drop down that allows you to select between different values. Lets call it dropdown A. Depending on the value selected, a gridview gets generated.

How generation works: When a item in the dropdown A gets selected, inside the selectedIndexChanged is a method call to a function that creates a DataTable. That datatable gets binded to the gridview inside selectIndexChanged.

When it gets bounded, onRowBoundEvent gets called, and this is where I add all the necessary controls with unique IDs.

There is a button called saved that looks at the data in gridview, and saves it.

Problem: When I press save, there are no controls in the gridview for me to find.

I can use findControl since I know all the ids, but how do I make the controls stick around?

If I bind it in the page_load, how do I know what gridview to generate since if I select a value from dropdown A, page_load still fires before I can get a selection value from dropdown A, so I can't make a simple conditional statement based on the dropdown value.

I can't show any code, sorry. But this is more of a conceptual question I have.

Answer 1

I was able to figure this out on my own.

PrePage_Load during the project lifecycle has access to controls. Dropdown A in my example can be accessed in PrePage_Load, allowing me to get the necessary values and set them before Page_Load starts.

For controls in the gridview, I made it so the gridview does not automatically load from viewstate, and I rebuilt the gridview myself during page_load.