Question

I have a server control that needs to programmatically inject a JavaScript reference into the page. It is to reference Microsoft’s Bing map control which requires &s=1 to be appended to the script URL for use over SSL. The problem is that the .NET Framework encodes the attributes and changes the & to an & (verified with Reflector). At some point after that the & is removed altogether.

Desired script tag:

<script type="text/javascript"
  src="https://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2&s=1">
</script>

Attempt 1:

var clientScriptManager = this.Page.ClientScript;
if (!clientScriptManager.IsClientScriptIncludeRegistered(this.GetType(), "BingMapControl"))
{
 clientScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptInclude(
  this.GetType(), "BingMapControl",
  "https://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2&s=1");
}

Attempt 2:

HtmlGenericControl include = new HtmlGenericControl("script");
include.Attributes.Add("type", "text/javascript");
include.Attributes.Add("src",
 "https://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2&s=1");
this.Page.Header.Controls.Add(include);

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Desired script tag:

<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”https://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2&s=1″>
</script>

Actually, no. In fact, your desired script tag is:

<script type="text/javascript" 
    src="https://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2&amp;s=1">
</script>

You do want the & to be encoded as &. Why? Because the HTML standard says so. See, for example, Section C.12. Using Ampersands in Attribute Values (and Elsewhere) of the XHTML 1.0 standard:

In order to ensure that documents are compatible with historical HTML user agents and XML-based user agents, ampersands used in a document that are to be treated as literal characters must be expressed themselves as an entity reference (e.g. “&“). For example, when the href attribute of the a element refers to a CGI script that takes parameters, it must be expressed as http://my.site.dom/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?class=guest&name=user rather than as http://my.site.dom/cgi-bin/myscript.pl?class=guest&name=user.