«
»

Getting rid of the Naming container in ASP.Net 2.0 – update

In my previous article, Getting rid of the Naming Container in asp.net 2.0, I explained a method to override the extended naming functionality provided by ASP.net in order to create client-side controls with better IDs.

I was however informed in the comments that by overriding the NamingContainer property the control loses the ability to read its value from the PostBack data.

Since the controls I developed were not meant to to be used in a postback scenario, this wasn’t a big problem for me.

Fast-forward a couple of years and here I am, wondering why post back does not work in one of my projects 😉

Anyway, I looked at the link provided by Alex, where Rick Strahl talks about overriding the ClientId and the UniqueId properties instead of NamingContainer.

In a standard web control, the two properties ClientID and UniqueID are mapped, respectively, to the id and name properties of the HTML control generated.

Since most (all? ) JS frameworks use the id property to access the varius HTML elements and the PostBack mechanism uses the name property, I think the “best of both worlds” solution is to only override the ClientId:

public class NiceTextBox : System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox
{
    public bool UseNamingContainer { get; set; }

    
    public override string ClientID
    {
        get
        {
            if (this.UseNamingContainer)
                return base.ClientID;
            else
                return this.ID;
        }
    }
}

Now our NiceTextBox works even during post-back scenarios 🙂

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 5:33 pm and is filed under asp.net, Tips and tricks, web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.