2 Mutually exclusive RadioButton "Lists" - asp.net

Question

I think this has to be THE most frustrating thing I've ever done in web forms. Yet one would think it would be the easiest of all things in the world to do. That is this:
I need 2 separate lists of radiobuttons on my .aspx page. One set allows a customer to select an option. The other set does also but for a different purpose. But only one set can have a selected radiobutton.
Ok I've tried this using 2 asp.net Radiobuttonlists controls on the same page. Got around the nasty bug with GroupName (asp.net assigns the control's uniqueID which prevents the groupname from ever working because now, 2 radiobuttonlists can't have the same groupname for all their radiobuttons because each radiobuttonlist has a different uniqueID thus the bug assigns the unique ID as the name attribute when the buttons are rendered. since the name sets are different, they are not mutually exclusive). Anyway, so I created that custom RadioButtonListcontrol and fixed that groupname problem.
But when ended up happening is when I went to put 2 instances of my new custom radiobuttonlist control on my .aspx page, all was swell until I noticed that every time I checked for radiobuttonlist1.SelectedValue or radiobuttonlist2.SelectedValue (did not matter which I was checking) the value always spit back string.empty and i was not able to figure out why (see http://forums.asp.net/t/1401117.aspx).
Ok onto the third try tonight and into the break of dawn (no sleep). I tried to instead just scrap trying to use 2 custom radiobuttonlists altogether because of that string.empty issue and try to spit out 2 sets of radiobuttonlists via using 2 asp.net repeaters and a standard input HTML tag inside. Got that working. Ok but the 2 lists still are not mutually exclusive. I can select a value in the first set of radiobuttons from repeater1 and same goes for repeater2. I cannot for the life of me get the "sets" to be mutually exclusive sets of radiobuttons.

Answer 1

As you have two groups of radio buttons that you want to function as one group of radio buttons, the solution is simple: Make it one group of radio buttons.
The only problem you have then is that the value that you get has the same name from both lists, but that can be solved by adding a prefix to the values so that you easily identify from which list the option comes.

Answer 2

Update: based on the new info posted as an answer. The option I proposed on my original answer corresponds to the 3. You really must consider the following:
Html radio buttons have only 1
built-in mechanism to handle the
exclusivity, which is the name.
You are explicitly requesting a no js solution, so given the above you must manipulate the Ids to achieve it. If you weren't blocking this option I am sure someone would come up with some nice jquery or js library that already supports it.
The option 3 is clearly the less invasive, as you are not forced to affect the actual data, and are not affected by future updates to it.
It's not that much code, just something extra on the List indexes, and some simple thing as:
int? list1Value = null;
int? list2Value = null;
var value = Request.Form["somegroup"];
if (value.StartsWith("List1"))
list1Value = int.Parse(value.Substring(5));
else
list2Value = int.Parse(value.Substring(5));//Assuming List2 as prefix
Original:
I saw your other question, and you just need to use the same group name. Make sure you have different values for all items regardless of the list they come from. A way to achieve this is adding something to the values, like: <%# "List1-" + Eval("ID") %> and modifying the code that reads your Request.Form["yourgroupname"].

Answer 3

I think you should just use RadioButtons instead of RadioButtonLists.
Here's an article that presents a solution to resolve the radiobutton naming bug.

Answer 4

Though this post is dated 1 year ago already, I just read it because I face the same problem.
Currently I have 1 solution using jQuery:
Client side script (you must also include jQuery)
function SetRadio(rb) {
$('input:checked').attr('checked', false);
rb.checked = true;
}
For every radiobutton (which is a listitem in a radiobuttonlist) I add the following on the serverside:
li.Attributes.Add("onclick", "javascript:SetRadio(this)");
For me this works in both IE and Firefox, with 3 radiobuttonlists, without using groupnames.
You can check each radiobuttonlist for a selecteditem/value, or you can extend the SetRadio function so it stores the selected value in a hidden field.
Regards,
M