Question

1) I’ve page class
public partial class MyDelivery : System.Web.UI.Page

2) ASCX is in different subfolder
public partial class MyControls_Hello_Bye : System.Web.UI.UserControl

I am unable to access #1 parent page class from control

Answer 1

This problem annoyed me for quite a while. I don’t think my solution is perfect, but it sure helps my junior developers in coding. We have a base user control that all user controls inherit and we (like you) we have a base page class that all pages must inherit (team rule). In the user control is a property called ParentForm which is strongly typed to the specific page type that will contain it (the page baseclass if that is variable or unknown at the time).

During the load event of the page, we manually set the Parentform Property of all user controls (we do this in our master page for all master page level controls as well).

protected Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e) 
{
    this.myControl.ParentForm = this;
    this.myControl2.ParentForm = this;
}

This provides immediate access from any user control back to the page and any of its exposed methods. It also provides a standardized (within our team) method of allowing controls to communicate between themselves through an interface in the ParentForm.

Our standard is to perform this assignment manually. For me this was a personnel consideration to make sure developers are aware of the controls they are adding (not setting the ParentForm will cause null reference exceptions if you attempt to access it obviously). If you wanted to perform this setting automagically, you could use the base class’s Page_InitComplete event to cycle through any user controls and set the ParentForm to “this” that way.