The goal of this post is to provide an easy to understand example of how to enable editing in an SPGridView. In this case, my datasource of choice is a SharePoint list.

The way that I chose to implement editing in an SPGridView involved two classes:

  • SimpleLogic – handles query and update operations
  • SimpleSPGrid – handles all of the setup for the ObjectDataSource and the SPGridView

The main advantage for splitting the two classes is to separate all of the business logic into one class. Ideally, you should be able to completely change how the SimpleLogic class retrieves/updates data without changing the SimpleSPGrid code.

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If you’ve done any work with SharePoint and SPAuditEntry, you may have noticed the distinct lack of Create event. Instead, two Update events are created which means some extra processing is required.

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Add this to the list of things every SharePoint developer should know (up there with disposing SPWebs and SPSites).

In general…

  1. Don’t update SharePoint objects on a GET request
  2. Call SPUtility.ValidateFormDigest() before anything on a POST request

Here are the two links to read:

May 20, 2010 Update
This post is about using a C# console app to update choice fields via SharePoint web services.  If you are looking for more information on how SharePoint web services can be called via JavaScript, check out my post on building a simple SharePoint AJAX app.


My problem started with a simple change to a site column. I had originally created a Country field with the following values:

  • US
  • Canada

After a change in requirements, the new values for the field were:

  • Canada
  • Germany
  • Great Britain
  • Ireland
  • United States

After updating the site column, I then needed to update the hundreds of items in the list to use “United States” instead of “US”. Instead of updating hundreds of items manually, I decided to write a small web services console app. (I was also not able to update it in datasheet… due to content approval maybe???)

However, I quickly ran into problems when attempting to update the multi-select choice field.

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May 20, 2010 Update
If you are looking for a great example on how to create an SPGridView, check out Erik Burger’s blog:

  1. Building A SPGridView Control – Part 1: Introducing the SPGridView
  2. Building A SPGridView Control – Part 2: Filtering

This post is really meant to supplement part 2 of Erik’s guide and address values in the grid that include apostrophes when using filtering.


The SPGridView is one of the most useful SharePoint controls. You can use it to do sorting, grouping, and filtering just like the out of the box List View Web Part does for regular lists and libraries. This makes it relatively easy to create a custom grid with your own data. Unfortunately, filtering with the SPGridView is a little quirky, especially if your data could potentially contain apostrophes.

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