A Couple Of, I Hope Basic Questions RE SqlDataSource's And Scripting

Greetings!

 I am writing a proof of concept ASP.net application for my employer and I have run into a couple perplexing issues.  First off, In my Page_Load event I have the following code.

txOTHrs.Attributes["onBlur"] = "return calculateTotal(this)";

The onblur event handler is coded as follows

function calculateTotal(tb)

{

    var regHrs = document.getElementById ("txRegHrs").value;

    var otHrs = document.getElementById("txOtHrs").value;

    var rate = document.getElementById("txRate").value;

    var regAmt = rate * regHrs;

    var otAmt= rate * ( otHrs * 1.5 );

    var total = otAmt + regAmt;

    document.getElementById("txTotal").value = total;

}

Everything seems to work fine. The onBlur event is handled and, as I expect the value in the txTotal text box is updated correctly.  The problem occurs when I try to access that value in the codebehind page. When ever I look at txTotal.Text in the debugger it is always blank. This has left me scratching my head as I can clearly see a value on the web page. Have I missed some step where I have to notify the server that a value in the control has changed ?

 

My second question is, I hope a very easy one to answer.  In WinForms when I have a dataset I can access the individual rows ( in an untyped dataset ) by speficying dataset.tables["tableName"].Rows[index]. Is there any similar mechanism for accessing the individual rows, and fields in the SqlDataSource object in ASP.net ?

 

Any help anyone can provide is greatly appreciated!!