With a database driven site it’s very useful if pages giving details of a specific product have that product name in the page title.

This sounds like it should be quite easy but it isn’t. You can insert data from a field into a page quite easily by binding the data to a control. However, the ASP.NET controls have to sit with the <form> tags in the <body> of the HTML so binding data to the <head> section is more difficult.

It has to be done programmatically. Here how’s it’s done in VB.

Dim dv As Data.DataView
dv = CType(srcDataSourceControl.Select(DataSourceSelectArguments.Empty), Data.DataView)
Dim dr As Data.DataRowView = dv(0)
Dim strProductName As String = CStr(dr(“ProductName”))
Dim strProductNumber As String = CStr(dr(“ProductNumber”))
Dim strProductCategory As String = CStr(dr(“ProductCategory”))
Page.Header.Title = strProductName & ” – ” & strProductNumber & ” – ” & strProductCategory

This example uses srcDataSourceControl as the data source control and assumes that the database table has fields called ProductName, ProductNumber and ProductCategory. You can bind as many fields as you like in this way.

The title is set by giving a string value to Page.Header.Title. This can be strings bound with DataView (strProductName) or bits of text in quote marks (” – “) joined by the & sign.

One final important thing. The <head> section in your page HTML must include the runat=”server” to enable the header content to be manipulated on the server side.

<head runat=”server”>