Hi there.

I've been doing Beginning ASP 4, and I've confused myself about base pages and master pages, specifically when to use one, or the other, or both.

I did a little test whereby I've entered the following code:

this.page.title = ("XXXX Title")

where XXXX = BasePage, MasterPage or just Page.

I've found that the page overrides the master page which overides the base page. Presumable because they are applied at different stages of the lifecycle. But it got me to thinking, why use a base page at all? You could stuff all the code common to every page in the master page codebehind, then it's all neat and in one place.

Every content page you do receives all the code from the masterpage, so what's the point of a base page?

I'm not sure I get the whole object oriented thing yet... :-/

Thanks for any insights!

Mark

Hi Mark,

You should see the master page as a common place for design, and a base page as a common place for behavior. There's some overlap (such as setting the title) between the two, but in general they serve different purposes. For example, it you added a method to do something on each page to the BasePage, it becomes available to all pages using that BasePage automatically and you could call it directly from those pages.

Cheers,

Imar

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Imar Spaanjaars
http://Imar.Spaanjaars.Com
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Author of Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 : in C# and VB, Beginning ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix
and Beginning ASP.NET 4 : in C# and VB.
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