Hi! Thank you for reading.

I am coding my first custom control. I want the control to be as "self contained" as possible, meaning "all code must be on the custom control's class".

I want each of the "myControl" objects to know how many of the same type ("myControl") are on page. The problem I see it that only for the "final" myControl, the counting will be accurate, but I thought that a static data member could solve that...

I coded what follows

public int myControlCounter(){
    int counter=0; Type myControlType = this.GetType(), t;

            foreach (Control c in this.Page.Controls){
                t = c.GetType();
                if (t == myControlType) counter++;
    }
            return counter;
}

On the OnInit method, I would place a line like:

totalMyControls=myControlCounter(); //totalMyControls is static int

I am not sure this will work. Are there alternatives?
Am I missing something?

Thank you, for your time.

I think a static member is the only way to do this, unless you want to do it in the parent page's class, which I don't think you want to do.

It all comes down to timing I think. When do you want your controls to know how many others are on the page? Obviously each time you increment the control counter, it will only know about the controls on the page so far.

If you do it in one of the Page's events, like maybe Page.PreRender, you can then put something like...

TotalMyControls = Page.NumberOfMyControls

into the Control.SaveViewState event handler.

Yes, then your control is dependent on the Page, but you can always overload the page class, or use a master page.

HTH

Aaron