Have you ever wanted to easily use the old asp of
includes to create templated pages in .Net/C#.
Something like;
<!--#include file="header.asp"-->
<form><Do Stuff</form>
<!--#include file="footer.asp"-->
There are several ways to handle this, the most common
is UserControls, but I found them lacking in certain
functionality. So I figured out this little trick. To
simplifiy things, I am only going to pass a value to
change the page title.
There are three parts to this. The HTML code on the control,
the HTML code on the base page, and the code behind on
the base page. Lets pretend the control page is named
header.ascx, and the base page is default.aspx
On the ASCX form, header.ascx
<head>
<title runat="server" id="PageTitle" />
</head>
On your new page,default.aspx, register the control and
create an object with the new tag
<%@ Register TagPrefix="header" TagName="HeaderText" Src="header.ascx" %>
<header:HeaderText runat="server" ID="header" NAME="header"/>
<form method="post" runat="server">
</form>
</body>
And lastly, on the codebehind, default.cs, connect everything
together.
protected header header; //control name
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
HtmlGenericControl PageTitle = (HtmlGenericControl)header.FindControl("PageTitle");
PageTitle.InnerText = "Welcome to ItSuckToBeJoe.com";
}
Bingo, instead templated pages with values within the
header file control being sent from the base page.
