Question

I have a table on my ASP.net page something like this:

<table runat="server" id="resultsTable"></table>

I dynamically add content to the table, and it works just fine. However, I want to get the HTML of the table once I’ve added the dynamic content, i.e. something like this (formatting isn’t important, I’ve just added it)

<table runat="server" id="resultsTable">
  <tr>
    <td>Hello!</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Goodbye!</td>
  </tr>
</table>

I need the result as a string. Obviously I could do some looping and build my own table with the data, but I’d prefer to not do that if at all possible.

Answer 1

Initially I though to just use the InnerHtml or InnerText methods, but these are not supported on the HtmlTable class.

So what if we use the Render method? Something like this (take from Anatoly Lubarsky)?

public string RenderControl(Control ctrl) 
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    StringWriter tw = new StringWriter(sb);
    HtmlTextWriter hw = new HtmlTextWriter(tw);

    ctrl.RenderControl(hw);
    return sb.ToString();
}

This method could obviously be cleaned up to handle closing the writers, etc.