How can something that should be so easy, be so difficult ???

If you have tried to use a Gridview, where some of the columns contains a lot of text. You maybe know what I am talking about ...
You get some very high rows who are destroying the entire design of your page.
To be honest, it looks like crap!

Here's an example:

 

And that's only 2 rows!
Microsoft please - give us a fixed rowheight!
Believe me when I say that it doesn't help to set the height to 20 or 15 pixels.
GridView is totally indifferent :0(


If you only have to use your Gridview with a single table the solution is very simple.
Connect your grid view with a datasource, so you get your columns delivered free of charge. 
Transform your columns into TemplatedFields. Now you can wrap the whole package into a div and hide the overflowing text, as shown in the code below. 

But when you do not know in advance which table your Gridview will be associated with, you immediately have problems.
Problems like this should be solved just by setting a rowheight property to 15px.

Well, I began to look for a solution on the web and discovered that I certainly was not alone with my problem.
After 2½ hours of surfing I gave up - there were apparently no one who had solved this problem ...

Very frustrated, I began to think - sometimes that really helps - my experience with the gridview told me that it is in RowDataBound event  things are happening.
Hmmm - we have a whole row filled with cells, what if we take the text out of each cell and put a Label in there instead, put some styles on the label and then we paste the text into our new label. 

It is worth a try ! 

Protected Sub gvTable_RowDataBound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewRowEventArgs) Handles gvTable.RowDataBound

If e.Row.RowType = DataControlRowType.DataRow Then
     For Each tc As TableCell In e.Row.Cells
          Dim l As New Label
          l.Height = 15
          l.Style.Add("Overflow-y", "hidden")
          l.Text = tc.Text
          tc.Text = ""
          tc.Controls.Add(l)
Next

End If

End Sub

Yes Yes Yes it works!


But it would be really nice if we could read the text in a tooltip, so let's try again:

 

Protected Sub gvTable_RowDataBound(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Web.UI.WebControls.GridViewRowEventArgs) Handles gvTable.RowDataBound

If e.Row.RowType = DataControlRowType.DataRow Then
     For Each tc As TableCell In e.Row.Cells
          Dim l As New Label
          l.Height = 15
          l.Style.Add("Overflow-y", "hidden")
          l.Text = tc.Text
          l.ToolTip = tc.Text
          tc.Text = ""
          tc.Controls.Add(l)
Next

End If

End Sub

I think we are just about there ... 

Now our Grid View like this: 

 

That is certainly something nicer.

So it still ended up being a nice day: 0)