You all must be knowing, I am fan of jQuery. The kind of neat and clean code and the power provided by jQuery at Client side scripting is unmatchable.

List Controls are one of the most used form controls. And we all know that manipulating these controls from JavaScript always have been a tough task.

In this post I’ll be discussing about accessing List controls and manipulating it with the help of jQuery. Hope you all like it and also will able to apply with other controls as well.

Let’s discuss it for CheckBoxList. I have a checkbox list and for demonstration also I have created a sample. For This sample I have created a dictionary with few Items and set it as a datasource of CheckboxList as

Dictionary dictItems = new Dictionary();
dictItems.Add(1, "Tea");
dictItems.Add(2, "Coffee");
dictItems.Add(3, "Lemon Tea");
dictItems.Add(4, "Expresso");
dictItems.Add(5, "Cappuccino");

chkItems.DataSource = dictItems;
chkItems.DataTextField = "Value";
chkItems.DataValueField = "Key";
chkItems.DataBind();

Lets also have a look at aspx code.

<div id="divcheckboxList">
        <asp:checkboxlist ID="chkItems" runat="server"></asp:checkboxlist>
     </div>

Here you can see I have put the CheckboxList in a div which Id is divcheckboxList.

This div will be very helpful while find the Items in CheckboxList because as you know the narrow search criteria we will pass to the jQuery, it will be as much faster.

Now lets have a look at rendered code

<div id="divcheckboxList">
<table id="chkItems" border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><input id="chkItems_0" type="checkbox" name="chkItems$0" /><label for="chkItems_0">Tea</label></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input id="chkItems_1" type="checkbox" name="chkItems$1" /><label for="chkItems_1">Coffee</label></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input id="chkItems_2" type="checkbox" name="chkItems$2" /><label for="chkItems_2">Lemon Tea</label></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input id="chkItems_3" type="checkbox" name="chkItems$3" /><label for="chkItems_3">Expresso</label></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><input id="chkItems_4" type="checkbox" name="chkItems$4" /><label for="chkItems_4">Cappuccino</label></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>

Now w’ll see some most important operations with the control using jQuery.

• Finding All Checkbox:

//This will return the array of all the checkboxes inside the div divcheckboxList
$('#divcheckboxList').find('input:checkbox')

• Finding all Selected CheckBox:

  //This will return the array of all the checkboxes inside the div divcheckboxList
  $('#divcheckboxList').find('input:checkbox:checked')
  

• Select all Selected CheckBox:

  //This finds all the checkbox in the div and adds the checked attribute to each checkbox which shows every checkbox as checked
   $($('#divcheckboxList').find('input:checkbox')).attr('checked', true);
  

• Remove Selection of all Selected CheckBox:

  //Find all checkBoxes and deselect it by removing checked attribute to each checkbox (in the div divcheckboxList)
  $('#divcheckboxList').find('input:checkbox:checked').removeAttr('checked');

• Adding event to each CheckBox:

   //Find all checkBoxes and attach a Click function (in the div divcheckboxList)
              $('#divcheckboxList').find('input:checkbox').click(function()
                   {
                       showvalue(this);
                   });
               }
  

• Removing event to each CheckBox:

  //Find all the checkBoxes and remove the attached Click function (in the div divcheckboxList)
  $('#divcheckboxList').find('input:checkbox').unbind('click');

• Getting Text of selected CheckBox:

  //Find all the selected checkbox and show the text of the checkbox
  var selectedCheckBoxes = $('#divcheckboxList').find('input:checkbox:checked').each(function () {
                  alert($(this).siblings('label').text());
              });
  

  As you see the above code, you might get confused. But if you see the rendered code, you will get know that every Checkbox is rendered as two controls, one Checkbox input control and another label which holds the text of Checkbox. That’s why to get the text of Checkbox, I had to find the sibling label of the checkbox

The same will aslo work for RadioButtonList.

Note: Here I have presented a way to work with List controls and demonstrated it using jQuery. There could be many more ways to do the same with help of jQuery and JavaScript.

Hope it will help the developers who are new with jQuery.

Cheers,

Brij