[Solved] Can I Use an ICustomFormatter

[Ric Pullen]

Working in the NHS we have a new directive that the NHS number must be displayed in an xxx xxx xxxx format, but all our current systems store it as an 10 Character string.

I have written a custom formatter, but struggling to find where I can place the code to display the format within the grids display. 
Can this be done and if so how?

Thanks

[Nikolay Rusev]

Hello Ric,

Generally on GridBoundColumn you set DataFormatString which will internally call String.Format(format,value). In your scenario DataFormatString could be as  follow: "{0:### ### ####}"

Other option if you need to apply your custom formatter is to use GridTemplateColumn and in ItemTemplate apply formatting on the value extracted from the item using custom formatter.

On the application attached to this post you will find example how to implement both cases.

Kind regards,
Nikolay
the Telerik team

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[Ric Pullen]

With the help of the previous post I managed to resolve the solution.  As the response from Telerik was regarding formatting numbers, which is already well documented, I had a custom formatter for a string which is not covered so below is the solution I came up with.

If you wish to use a Custom formatter then in order to display this in the radgrid, you will have to do something similar to the example below. (This is server based in order to trap the exception thrown by the custom formatter, writing the code client side would cause the exception to fire and be unhandled)

Server

Protected Function formatNHSNo(ByVal nhsnumber As String) As String

Try

   Return String.Format(New NHSFormatter(), "{0:sp}", nhsnumber)

Catch e As Exception

   Return String.Empty

End Try

End Function

ASPX

<Columns>

    <telerik:GridTemplateColumn HeaderText="NHS Number">

      <ItemTemplate>

           <%#formatNHSNo(Eval("patient_nhs_no"))%>

      </ItemTemplate>

   </telerik:GridTemplateColumn>

</Columns>