Retrieving the url of an attachement from a sharepoint list

Question

Guys im using the spquery object to retrieve some items from a list and populate a repeater. I need to grab the url of the attachment. Ive set IncludeAttachmentUrls to true but im not sure on the name of the field to use in the repeater.

     SPWeb Web = SPContext.Current.Web;
     SPList List = Web.Lists["LinksList"];

     SPQuery Query = new SPQuery();
     Query.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Title' Ascending='False' /></OrderBy>";
     Query.IncludeAttachmentUrls = true;

     RPTLinks.DataSource = List.GetItems(Query).GetDataTable();
     RPTLinks.DataBind();

Answer 1

Richards,

Since Attachments can be more than one, there is a property in SPListItem.Attachments to access all the attachments, here is how you can access the complete URL:

AttachUrl = properties.ListItem.Attachments.UrlPrefix + properties.ListItem.Attachments[0];

So you need to work on Repeater's ItemDataBound event to bind URL to Hyperlink!

Answer 2

As described by Arsalan, writing your custom code in ItemDataBound can be a perfect choice but in that case you may need to fetch the attachment data again with the item id as you are binding the datatable, and if i am not much mistaken at the time of databind the splistitem information is lost, can hit the performance a little (very small) otherwise you can include the information before you bind the datatable, this is what i do -

SPListItemCollection coll = list.GetItems(oQuery);
DataTable collData = coll.GetDataTable();
collData.Columns.Add("AttachmentNames", typeof(string));
System.Text.StringBuilder attachments=new System.Text.StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < coll.Count; i++)
{                    
    if (coll[i].Attachments.Count > 0)
    {
       attachments.Clear();
       foreach (string attachment in coll[i].Attachments)
       {
         attachments.Append(attachment).Append("; ");
         //to get the url also
         //attachments.Append(coll[i].Attachments.UrlPrefix).Append(attachment).Append("; ");
       }
       collData.Rows[i]["AttachmentNames"] = attachments.ToString();
    }
}