I have a data entry screen with several textboxes and dropdownlists. It handles multiple tasks. Depending on the task selected, certain controls are made visible and enabled while the others and not. My question; is there a way to display the visible controls together at the top of the screen rather than their predefined position at runtime?
Thanks for any help,
Michael Stevens

Is your page using Grid layout? If this is the case then your controls will always be where you put them in the designer. However, if you make the page with flow layout and you change the visibility of controls, the controls after those invisibile controls will slide up/over to take their place in the flow of the page.

Thanks for your reply Planoie, I am now using a table defined in the HTML and as the panel is being defined in Page_Load I'm trying to create various controls on the fly in the table cells, depending on the panel called for. The controls appear correctly, but I'm not having any luck getting them to connect to an event handler. In Page_Load, I add a row to the table, add cells, create a button, enable it and add it to a cell. I then connect it to an event handler,
b1.Click += new System.EventHandler(button1_Click);
and throughout the rest of the Page_Load, using the Quick View, the button seems to be aware of the handler. When I click it, however, it is not seen. I am programming in C#. Thanks for any help.
Michael Stevens

When you create controls on the fly, you need to create them every time the page is loaded in order for their events to be fired properly. Are you adding the rows/cells/buttons on every page hit?

-Peter

Thanks Peter. No. Picture a table row with 3 cells containing a textbox, button and dropdownlist, respectively when the page is displayed. I would like to be able to add text to the textbox, click the button and move the text to the dropdownlist several times. When I load the page each time, the event handler fires but the textbox doesn't seem to be visible in the event handler. If I don't rebuild the table, the event will not fire. Steep end of the learning curve. Thanks, Michael.

Mike, sorry for the delay in responding to this thread. Have you had any success?

Can you post your page_load code?

If your goal is to have several options for what's on the page, you can place each option in a panel and just turn the right panel on when appropriate. You mentioned using a panel above, but it seems you are adding the controls dynamically. Dynamic control creation is very tricky because of the way the page restores viewstate the control hierarchy. I've found that multi-phase/mode pages work best with placeholders or panels that you turn on and off.

-Peter

Peter, Thanks for your response. Due to production needs, I had to scrap the original Page_Load and move on to plan B, which was your suggestion from 1/14 of adding all controls and playing with their visibility. That works fine, although I'm carrying the overhead of 50 odd invisible controls at any one time.

 I haven't given up on the dynamic control idea, but I'll have to pursue it in my free time.

Forgive my terminology shortcomings, I'm pretty new to C# and .Net. I meant page, not panel in my previous post. I'll look into your panel suggestion and do some further viewstate research.

Again, thanks.
Michael