yes, apparently that is true and thanks for the follow-up...i'm getting the row cell data i need when the OnSelectedIndexChanged fires for the dropdown (celltemplate) in the above code...works very nicely, its been an interesting learning journey

thanks again to all who responded

I think I've just figured out why this is happening, and what you're doing here is the best solution I know of.

When you have a templated column, you no longer have a direct connection between what's displayed in the cell and the value of the cell.

Why is this?  Column templates may have more than one control, and the cell may not know which of those controls to use for its value, how to retrieve the value from any one of those controls, or if indeed it should use any of those controls at all to determine its value.

An alternate solution is to listen to client-side events of the controls on your column template and use these to update the value of the corresponding cell.  However, this is a lot of work to implement.  The solution of using the server-side events of the controls in the column template is often just as effective, and is usually easier to do.

 so much for getting the data through a grid event i'm doing this in the dropdown event and it works perfect:

DropDownList dropdownlist = (DropDownList)sender;
            CellItem ci = (CellItem)dropdownlist.Parent;
            int rownumber = ci.Cell.Row.Index;

datastore = gridx.Rows[rownumber].Cells[0].Text;

 the only events that i see firing are the "active" events (row and cell)  selected and update events are not

so one solution is to postback every time they change a dropdown, but i was hoping to do this in updatebatch because i have a row with 5 dropdowns and could have (usually do have) multiple rows

 thanks everyone for their help so far...i have done all of the above...here is what i still can't figure out...the OnSelectedIndexChanged event fires when i change an item in the dropdown that is a celltemplate in the grid...that is good because i need the value from the new item changed too, but i also need an id from the row of the grid and the "grid row"event don't seem to fire

any other ideas?