Ch 8/9 accessing User Control controls

AlanWheeler · January 27th, 2014, 01:15 PM

Hi Imar,

I was trying to experiment a little with the Contact Us page and create a Page_Load method that pre-fills the email form. I can't figure out how to access the user control controls from Contact.aspx.vb.

In the calculator demo we just accessed a label with 'ResultLabel.Text = ...'. But the controls for the email User Control aren't part of the Contact.aspx page directly and don't show up in Intellisense.

I started with ContactForm1., but I'm not able to tell from the Intellisense list what the next term would be.

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Alan

Imar · January 27th, 2014, 02:52 PM

Hi there,

The Contact Form encapsulates these controls so you can't access them directly. There are a few ways around this:

1. Set the values in the Control's Load method.

2. Create properties, like the NavigateUrl in the Banner. As the backing variable they should use the associated controls. E.g. something like this:

Code:

public string FirstName 
{
  get
  {
    return FirstName.Text;
  }
  set
  {
    FirstName.Text = value;
  }
}

Then in the page that uses the contact form, you can do:

ContactForm1.FirstName = "Some default value"; // Use Profile.FirstName perhaps?

In both case, make sure you don't do this on a PostBack (check for Page.IsPostBack) or you'll wipe out the values the user entered.

Hope this helps,

Imar

AlanWheeler · January 27th, 2014, 05:06 PM

Hi Imar,

Thanks for the quick reminder about creating properties. I will have to do that later as it quickly became apparent trying to do this from the contact.aspx form was going to be pretty involved.

I ended up adding 2 methods for debugging purposes in the ContactForm.ascx.vb file; a Page_Load method that loads up the form if it's not a postback (thank you very much for the reminder), and clear method behind a button.

So, when the page first loads it has a debug email ready to go, and if I want to test the client side error checking I can clear it and we're back to normal.

I'll re-approach accessing the User Control controls after I finish the book because it takes so much time to really absorb each chapter and I don't want to slow down right now.

Later...

Best Regards,
Alan

January 28th, 2014, 12:49 AM

Quote:

Create properties, like the NavigateUrl in the Banner

i was missing this why not getting the outcome right .. appreciate the suggestions coming to help me