How do I break the a BoundField's HeaderText

Question

In HTML in the td of a table you can break text by using <BR> between the words. This also works in the HeaderText of a TemplateItem but not the HeaderText of a BoundField. How do I break up the Header text of a BoundField.

Joeljoela

You can use NewLine (not BR) and white-space: pre-line css as suggested in How to properly display line breaks in asp GridView BoundField without turning HTML encoding off – Paediatrician

Answer 1

Set HtmlEncode = false inside the BoundField

 <asp:BoundField DataField="SomeDataField" 
        HeaderText="SomeHeader<br />(OtherData)" 
        HtmlEncode="false" />

BoundField.HtmlEncode is true by default which means that if HTML is added in the text it will be encoded.
If HtmlEncode is set to false the text is not encoded and the br will work as expected. Unfortunately is not possible to specify this only for the header text, it will affect the cell contents as well.

Hopefully

+1: i missed this little property and was looking for serious hacks. thanks :) – Leann

This will, of course, mess up the actual field text display (if it has things that look like HTML, including &), so beware. Especially if the grid displays user-supplied data, because you're opening yourself up for an injection attack. – Prepare

HtmlEncode="false" is not recommended due to potential XSS attacks learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/… – Paediatrician

Answer 2

For those of you trying to do this without disabling HtmlEncode it's pretty simple, if a little silly looking. Just use a real line break. Like so...

<asp:BoundField DataField="ProposedExtractionStartDate" HeaderText="Proposed
                        Extraction Start Date" SortExpression="ProposedExtractionStartDate"  DataFormatString="{0:MM/dd/yyyy}" />

That will actually come out as multi-line when the HTML renders.

If there is a character combination that will signify this, I would love to know it.

Sac

I didn't test with the front end tag, but if defining a BoundField from the code-behind, I successfully got the text to break with \n\r. – Mexico