What's the best way to send a lot of checkboxes to the client in ASP.Net?

Question

I have the following situation:

A user will define a certain filter on a page, and on postback I will query the database using that filter and return a bunch of matching records to the user, each with a checkbox next to it, so he can choose whether to act on each of those records.

In Classic ASP / PHP I can generate a lot of controls named "chk__*" and then on postback go through all the $POST entries looking for the ones prefixed "chk".

What is the best way to do this in ASP.Net 2.0?

I can do it easily by implementing a Repeater with a Template containing the checkbox, bind the Repeater to a Dataset, and then on the second Postback, I just do:

For Each it As RepeaterItem In repContacts.Items
    Dim chkTemp As CheckBox = DirectCast(it.FindControl("cbSelect"), CheckBox)
    If chkTemp.Checked Then

    End If
Next

However this has the slight disadvantage of giving me a HUGE Viewstate, which is really bad because the client will need to re-upload the whole viewstate to the server, and these people will probably be using my site over a crappy connection.

Any other ideas? (I can also create the controls dynamically and iterate through Request.Form as in the old days, however, I was looking for a cleaner

Answer 1

Do it the same way you did it in classic ASP. Use <input type="checkbox"> instead of <asp:checkbox>. You can access the raw post paramaters using Request.Form