Nested Repeaters in ASP.NET

Question

I have a class that contains hierarchical data. I want to present this data in my ASP.net webapp using nested repeaters. How do I do this? I've only ever done one level of nesting, how do I do say five levels?

Each item can have zero or many sub items. I'm basically just indenting at each subleveling using some css stuff. I do not want to use the treeview control, I want to strictly stick with a repeater.

Update:
My data comes from a database. I have an item datatable with some basic properties.

Item
{
   ID,
   Name,
   Description,
   ...
}

Then I have a many to many table with:

Parent
{
   ParentID,
   ChildID
}

I'm iterating through each item and displaying its children; and its children's children. I assume this would best be accomplished with nested repeaters, but I could be wrong.

Answer 1

I've found that the simplest way to do nested repeaters without worrying about databinding events is to just set the DataSource using <%# %> syntax.

For example:

<asp:Repeater runat="server" id="Departments">
  <ItemTemplate>
    Name: <%# Eval("DeptName") %>
    Employees:
    <asp:Repeater runat="server" DataSource='<%# Eval("Employees") %>'>
      <ItemTemplate><%# Eval("Name") %></ItemTemplate>
      <SeparatorTemplate>,</SeparatorTemplate>
    </asp:Repeater>
  </ItemTemplate>
</asp:Repeater>

This is presuming that your Departments class has an Employees property - eg:

public class Department {
  public string DeptName {get; set;}
  public IEnumerable<Employee> Employees {get; set;}
}
public class Employee {
  public string Name {get; set;}
}

If your outer-repeater object doesn't have a property corresponding to the inner-repeater object you can still use this trick, by adding a method in your code-behind that does the calculation. So your inner repeater might become:

<asp:Repeater runat="server" DataSource='<%# GetEmployees(Container.DataItem) %>'>

and then GetEmployees might look something like:

protected IEnumerable<Employee> GetEmployees(object item) {
  var dept = (Department) item;
  // then do whatever is necessary to get the employees from dept
  return employees;
}