Handling null values with bound RadioButtonList

Sometimes when you're binding a RadioButtonList and there's a null value in one of the records, you can end up getting an exception thrown. The problem here is that it tries to select a ListItem that has the same value as the record retrieved from the database, in this case, null.

There are plenty of workarounds for this issue, including changing your query to don't retrieve nulls, or using a COALESCE instead, for example. In this post, I'll show a simple trick to handle this.


Binding to nothing

As I said, the big secret is to have a ListItem with the same value retrieved from the query. If your retrieved value is NULL, your ObjectDataSource will convert it to an empty string automatically, so you'd only need to have a ListItem with an empty string marked to be its value, like the following:

<asp:RadioButtonList runat="server" ID="radioButtonList1" SelectedValue='<%# Bind("NullableColumn") %>'>
    <asp:ListItem Text="MyEmptyStringOption" Value=""/>
    <asp:ListItem Text="MyOption1" Value="1" />
    <asp:ListItem Text="MyOption2" Value="2"/>
    <asp:ListItem Text="MyOption3" Value="3"/>                    
</asp:RadioButtonList>

By doing that, when bound, the selected option will appear as the EmptyStringOption, so we have already prevented that Exception from happening. But what would we write to the empty string option text? "None"? It makes no sense having an option that says None on the screen, right?

So let's hide it. That way, we'll always have at least one option selected, even if the return value is null, but the user will only see the options with an actual value, making it look like the RadioButtonList has no selected option at all.

If you check ListItem's attributes, you'll see that it does not have a Visible attribute, so we're going to hide it through CSS. Even if it had a Visible attribute, if we'd set it to "False", the ListItem wouldn't even be rendered, causing the exception to return to happen, as we wouldn't have an option with an empty string value.


To hide it, simply add the style attribute to it, like this:

<asp:ListItem Text="MyEmptyStringOption" Value="" style="display: none;" />

But now you'll see something else. Even if not instantly, the compiler might show you a warning message, telling you that element ListItem does not have a 'style' attribute even though it works perfectly fine. If that warning message annoys you enough to make you want to get rid of it like it does to me, remove the style attribute from the ListItem, and add it programmatically on the Page's Load event, like this:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // First find the ListItem in question, and then add the style attribute to it
    MyRadioButtonList.Items.FindByValue("").Attributes.Add("style", "display: none");
}

This will have the same effect, and it will not show you that warning...