Question

For an E-Commerce system, after the order is placed I have a custom user control that displays the order details. I also want to write the same order details to an email so I want to write the contents of the user control out to a string that I can add to the body of the email.

I tried using RenderControl but, the none of the dynamically populated label controls on the user control were populated.

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);
    HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw);
    OrderDetails1.RenderControl(htw);
    return sb.ToString();

I found somewhere else that I could add the control to a page and then write the output of the page to a string but this felt kludgy.

It seems like I should be able to capture the contents of the control when it is first rendered so that I don’t have to repopulate it and re-render it. Anyone know how?

If not, what’s the cleanest way to populate the control?

Answer 1

Turns out the RenderControl code was proper, I just needed to call the controls FillData() function to repopulate the controls from the database.

private string RenderOrderInfo()
{
    //TODO: Should be able to use RenderControl for this and delete everything beyond the 1st 3 lines
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);
    HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(sw);
    OrderDetails1.FillData();
    OrderDetails1.RenderControl(htw);
    return sb.ToString();
}