Today I struggled for a while with a FormView that for no apparent reason wasn’t updating some of my fields to the database. After sometime I noticed that the fields that were not getting inserted into the database where the ones I had wrapped inside an UpdatePanel. Coincidence? I don’t think so…

I did a few tests and noticed that that was the problem indeed. I can’t say exactly what is the problem but it seems like that the FormView doesn’t like to have it’s fields inside an UpdatePanel.

The way I found to get around this issue is to populate the parameters manually in the events of the ObjectDataSource (ODS). So if you’re trying to insert a record you might using the Inserting event of the ODS to populate the problematic paramters:

    protected void ObjectDataSource1_Inserting(object sender, ObjectDataSourceMethodEventArgs e)
    {
        e.InputParameters["FirstName"] = ((TextBox)FormView1.FindContro("TextBoxFirstName")).Text;
        e.InputParameters["LastName"] = ((TextBox)FormView1.FindContro("TextBoxLastName")).Text;
        e.InputParameters["City"] = ((TextBox)FormView1.FindContro("TextBoxCity")).Text;
    }

In the Inserting event of the ODS the InputParamters have already been populated (at least the ones outside the UpdatePanel) but the record hasn’t been inserted yet, so you are intercepting the parameters, adjusting it’s values and then letting it continue with the insertion.

I hope this code spares someone to have to go through the tests I had to do.