Question

I am working on a page that has user controls that are arranged in a particular layout. I am modifying that page to support reordering the position based on user’s preferences. So, essentially, on load, I have information on where I need to position the different user controls.

I can think of 2 approaches:

• Do the reordering on the client side. This is not ideal for the user
  as they see the reordering happening.
• Do the reordering on the server side. This requires me to do a lot of
  rewrite to dynamically load the user controls based on preferences.

Are there any other ways of accomplishing what I am trying to do?

Answer 1

There is an easier way; rendering is controlled by the parent container rendering them. It is possible to create a container, and have full control over the ordering of the rendering of its children (by overriding the RenderChildren method). It’s not the easiest option, but it can work. The steps are:

• Create a class that inherits from ContainerControl
• Override the RenderChildren method
• Within this method, it would render the children in the container, override it, do not call the base class version of it, and get the instances to the controls and render them. This is where the complication arises because you have to.