Question

I am almost too embarrassed to ask this question, but here we go…

I am not an expert with user controls, and need some design advise regarding trying to achieve a specific desired functionality.

The goal is to have a usercontrol that would render as a complex structure of html elements and css to form an elegant container box. The problem lies in how to populate the contents of the box as each instance of the usercontrol would have its own individual HTML content. The content container div of the usercontrol would be nested deep within the structure of the rendered html. It is undesirable to programmatically set the contents of the usercontrol, or use properties.

In psuedo-code, the desired syntax would be something like:

<usercontrol Title="Some Title"><p>some random html content</p></usercontrol>

A sample of the rendered usercontrol would be:

<div class="CommonBox">
    <div class="Title">Some Title</div>
    <div class="Content"><p>some random html content</p></div>
</div>

I hope my explanation is adequate. Does this make sense to anyone or is the desired functionality unachievable?

Cheers!

EDIT

I attempted the templated user control suggestion in the hopes of coming to a decent solution. I “waybacked” this site and now have a working templated user control. My next question is, how can I programmatically access the controls nested within the template… say there is a textbox control in the “Description” template from the example link and I want to set its value programmatically? Is this possible?

Answer 1

What you’re looking for is definitely possible. One solution is to create a templated user control. In the end you can define the contents similar to how your example looks. Something like:

<uc:MyControl Title="Some TItle" runat="server">
    <ContentsTemplate>
        <p>some random html content</p>
    </ContentsTemplate>
</uc:MyControl>

Here’s a simple how-to. I’ve done this in the past with success. There are lots of resources found through Google as well on the topic.