How to set ellipses on a column data if it exceeds more than a set record

Question

How to set ellipses on a column data

I have the following BoundField in my GridView:

Answer 1

text-overflow:ellipsis; only works if the the following properties are true:

The element's width must be specified. The element must have overflow:hidden and white-space:nowrap set. Change your css like below

.hideText  {
    width:120px;
    overflow:hidden;
    text-overflow:ellipsis;
    white-space:nowrap;
 }

Here is the working Demo

Update:

Here is your complete TemplateField definition. Define a div within the TemplateField and decorate with the css properties for ellipsis.

 <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Provider Name">
     <ItemTemplate>
          <div style="width: 100px; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">
               <asp:Label ID="lblEllipsis" runat="server" Text='<%#Eval("Provider") %>' ToolTip='<%#Eval("Provider") %>'></asp:Label>
          </div>
      </ItemTemplate>
 </asp:TemplateField>

Here is how it looks like when I tried this in a gridview locally.

Answer 2

You seem to be modifying this where you could not store it back to the database anyway so I would just handle it like this unless they need an option to then see the entirety of the data.

I did all this c# in this editor so there might be slight problems, lets call it psuedo code!

string provider = item["Provider"].ToString().Replace("#", "\n").TrimStart(';');
string[] providerListing = provider.Split(new[]{";"}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries));
if(providerListing.Length > 3)
{
    //Make an array of the first 3 providers
    string[] firstProviders = new string[3];
    Array.Copy(providerListing, firstProviders, 3);
    //Reconcatenate with ; and add ellipsis
    provider = String.Join(";",firstProviders)+"...";
}

If they do need to see the entirety of the data I would add another column called FullProviders or something like that to query.