I have been working on a solution that used the asp:ListView to manipulate data from an access database.

After defining the Layout, Item, EditItem, and Update Templates I was impressed with how much control I had over the display formats and CSS integration that this control allows.  The template I was using is a standard html table.  The display of the data worked perfectly, but when I attempted to edit a record it replaced everything with blank values.  Inserting a new record either gave me an error or inserted a new record with all the fields blank.

I started to troubleshoot by looking at various examples and tutorials on MSDN and the Internet.  I could see no difference between what I had coded and the examples.  I was using an AccessDataSource and all of the examples were using SqlDataSource, so I redefined the data source to be Sql and still the same behavior, display worked fine but editing did not work. 

I am one of those people who prefers to hand code as much as possible to make sure that I am understanding what is happening and how the controls work.  But, I had reached my limits, I just could not figure out what I was doing wrong.  I broke down and used the wizard for the ListView and let it create the templates and data source.  This worked. 

So after looking at the templates I discovered one little difference.  In my Item templates I had defined the <tr> tags to include the runat=”server” directive.  I removed this directive and everything started working like it is supposed to.

Why did this fix it?  Well, as near as I can figure when the items are inserted into the template replacing the itemPlaceholder the runat=”server” directive in the item templates overrode / hid / replaced the methods from the itemPlaceholder.