Question

I feel somewhat foolish asking such a simple question, but I can’t seem to find an answer. I’m new to ASP.NET (C#), but I’m learning by building a simple set of web pages that display a report. I have a variable that represents a company name. I need to output this variable in multiple places on the web page. The only way I have found to output a variable this is with:

company_name.Text = "Acme Windows";

then

<asp:literal id="company_name" runat="server" />

My problem is that I want to use company_name in multiple places on the page. Do I really have to create a separate variable holding the the same value for each time it is placed on the page? If I just copy the above XML code to all the places I want to show the variable it obviously creates a compile error since that ID is already defined.

I feel like I’m missing something very obvious.

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to create a string variable or property in your code-behind class and use the <%= %> notation (short for Response.Write) to render it on your page inline:

// You can do this anywhere on your .aspx, as many times as you like.
<%= this.CompanyName %>

// Better yet, html encode the value to protect against various threats,
// such as cross-site script injection (XSS)
<%= HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(this.CompanyName) %>

.NET 4.0 introduces a new shortcut notation (Html Encoding Blocks) to html-encode your output:

<%: this.CompanyName %>

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Regarding your original approach, ASP.NET web controls like Literal represent individual parts of a web page – you can’t use them multiple times on a page because the object instance company_name refers to the specific part of the HTML generated by the <asp:literal> in your .aspx page.