I'm a little confused by your intent here... why are you trying to dig into the user control like this? Have we moved on from the original topic of databinding?

Peter
------------------------------------------------------
Work smarter, not harder.

Right... I'm struggling as to how to get the selected value from the user control that has been successfully databound. Your PreRender suggestion worked perfectly. Now I can't figure out how to get to that control to find out what was selected when my form posts back.

"A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission"

I realized that the control is rendering on the page before I can call the submit method, so it is returning the correct selected index.... 0 .... aach. Suggestions?

"A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission"

Ok. I see what you want now. If you want to return a value of an user control's internal control you should create a public method on the user control to expose it. If you really need to, you could make the control (dropdown list in your case) public on the control but in most cases, you are only interested in the value/text/item.

Create a public property on the UserControl that exposes the selected Item/Value/Text, whichever you need. So in your user control class, do something like this:

Public Readonly Property AccountNumber() As String
    Get
        Return ddlAccountList.SelectedValue
    End Get
End Property

Now in the page, you can get that value: ucAccountListControl.AccountNumber.

In addition, you might also want to create an event for when the account number changes so you don't need to "get" it every time. This follows the event driven model of .net. In the user control:

Public Event AccountNumberChanged(sAccountNum As String)

In the DDL OnSelectedItemChanged handler:

RaiseEvent AccountNumberChanged(ddl.SelectedValue)

Something to that affect is what you want.

Peter
------------------------------------------------------
Work smarter, not harder.

protected void LocationDataBound(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        locations_ddl.ClearSelection();
        locations_ddl.Items.FindByValue(Location_Id_IN).Se lected = true;
    }

    public string Location_Id_IN
    {
        set
        {
            ViewState["loc_id"] = value;
        }

        get
        {
            return (string)ViewState["loc_id"];
        }
    }

    public string Location_Id
    {
        set
        {
            Location_Id_IN = value;
        }

        get
        {
            return locations_ddl.SelectedValue;
        }
    }

This works!!!

ex: <control:location id="id1" runat="server" Location_Id='<%# Bind("LOCATION_ID")%>'/>

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