How do I bind a ComboBox so the displaymember is concat of 2 fields of source datatable?

Question

I\'d like to bind a ComboBox to a DataTable (I cannot alter its original schema)

cbo.DataSource = tbldata;
cbo.DataTextField = \"Na         


        

Answer 1

The calculated column solution is probably the best one. But if you can't alter the data table's schema to add that, you can loop through the table and populate a new collection that will serve as the data source.

var dict = new Dictionary<Guid, string>();
foreach (DataRow row in dt.Rows)
{
    dict.Add(row["GUID"], row["Name"] + " " + row["Surname"]);
}
cbo.DataSource = dict;
cbo.DataTextField = "Value";
cbo.DataValueField = "Key";
cbo.DataBind();

Obviously this isn't as performant as binding directly to the DataTable but I wouldn't worry about that unless the table has thousands of rows.