Question

I asked how to render a UserControl’s HTML and got the code working for a dynamically generated UserControl.

Now I’m trying to use LoadControl to load a previously generated Control and spit out its HTML, but it’s giving me this:

Control of type ‘TextBox’ must be placed inside a form tag with runat=server.

I’m not actually adding the control to the page, I’m simply trying to grab its HTML. Any ideas?

Here’s some code I’m playing with:

TextWriter myTextWriter = new StringWriter(); HtmlTextWriter myWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(myTextWriter);  UserControl myControl = (UserControl)LoadControl('newUserControl.ascx'); myControl.RenderControl(myWriter);  return myTextWriter.ToString(); 

Answer 1

Alternatively you could disable the ServerForm/Event-validation on the page that is rendering the control to a string.

The following example illustrates how to do this.

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page {     protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)     {         string rawHtml = RenderUserControlToString();     }      private string RenderUserControlToString()     {         UserControl myControl = (UserControl)LoadControl('WebUserControl1.ascx');          using (TextWriter myTextWriter = new StringWriter())         using (HtmlTextWriter myWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(myTextWriter))         {             myControl.RenderControl(myWriter);              return myTextWriter.ToString();         }     }      public override void VerifyRenderingInServerForm(Control control)     { /* Do nothing */ }      public override bool EnableEventValidation     {         get { return false; }         set { /* Do nothing */}     } }