Question

I have a very large ASP.NET application in C#.

The issue is simple yet difficult/strange. No matter where in the code I try to change the visibility of the button, it retains its default value whether I set that to true or false.

I am not sure what could be causing this so I thought I might take a shot at asking for opinions here.

Answer 1

The Visible property inherits it’s state from parent controls.

For example:

<asp:Panel ID="Panel1" Visible="false" runat="server">
   <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="click me" />
</asp:Panel>

The Button will never be visible, as long as the container control Panel1 is invisible.

Implementation of Control.Visible:

public virtual bool Visible
{
    get
    {
        return !this.flags[16] 
        && (this._parent == null || this.DesignMode || this._parent.Visible);
    }
    set
    {
        // ...
    }
}

So when parent != null && !visible, the child control is invisible.