Radio button within a repeater problem

Recently I was developing a system to create tests and test questions.  For these tests our client wanted multiple choice questions.  To implement this I decided to have a list of textboxes for the answer text, and a radio button for each textbox to select the correct answer.   I knew that a RadioButtonList couldn’t have anything other than a radio button and text, so I went with a repeater.

<asp:Repeater ID="rptRadios" runat="server">
    <HeaderTemplate>
        <ul>
    </HeaderTemplate>
    <ItemTemplate>
        <li>
            <asp:RadioButton ID="rbRadio" runat="server" GroupName="RadioGroup" />
            &nbsp;
            <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtRadio"></asp:TextBox>
        </li>
    </ItemTemplate>
    <FooterTemplate>
        </ul>
    </FooterTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>

Doing it this way caused the group name of each radio button to be inconsistent, because of the repeater. After a while of researching and not finding any good solutions I decided to try changing the group name of the radio buttons using jQuery.

$("input:radio").attr('name', 'RadioGroup');

That gave me the radio button functionality that I wanted, but it prevented me from getting the selected radio button on postback. So I decided to just implement the radio button functionality manually.

var radios = $("input:radio");
radios.click(function() {
     radios.removeAttr('checked');
     $(this).attr('checked', 'checked');
     return true;
});

Which gave me the correct functionality and I could still get the selected radio button and textbox on postback. Probably not the most elegant solution, but I couldn’t find any other way to do it.

Also I needed to make sure at least one of the radio buttons was selected so I added a CustomValidator that called a javascript function.

function ValidateRadioButtons(sender, args) {
     args.IsValid = $("input:radio:checked").size() > 0;
}

2 Responses to “Radio button within a repeater problem”

  1. James Says:

    awesome. nice fix. sadly i cannot use js for my mobile WAP solution. this is a blooming nightmare! what a bad oversight aargh.

    cheers for the post!

    James

  2. Sherwin Says:

    Hey great. You’re right there’s no good solution on net. Other still wrote codebehind code >.<, this is the best solution! Thanks.


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