Working with GridView

I was asked by our VP to create a simple web part that could display all the birthdays in the current month.

This was a simple enough project, so I quickly coded it up, and showed it to our Dev. He pointed out that I had used Labels to add my names and birthdays to the web part and that it would make more sense to use a GridView.

That made sense, so I rewrote the web part. When I displayed it, I thought my columns were too close together. Now GridView gives you two ways to set column spacing .CellPadding and .CellSpacing. Both of these affect all four directions: top, bottom, left and right. I wanted just to set left or right, but couldn't find any way to do that.

I did a search, and found several people asking the same question, and the advice that came back was to set the column spacing in CSS. That didn't make me happy, as I prefer to keep everything in code so it is simpler to roll out later. I know, I know, CSS should be used for layout, but that really doesn't make sense for a web part that is meant to be reused multiple times.

I asked our dev for more advice and he said, just set the padding to the individual cells. Bingo! I wrote the following to loop through all my cells in the first column and add some padding:

for (int x = 0; x < displayGrid.Rows.Count; x++)

{

displayGrid.Rows[x].Cells[0].Attributes.CssStyle.Add(HtmlTextWriterStyle.PaddingRight, "20px");

}

That's a simple way to add some horizontal spacing to a GridView without affecting your Vertical spacing.