Question

I have an ASP.NET panel called pnlCategories. What I am trying to do is create a function that returns a List generic list of all Check Boxes that are checked inside this panel. There are other child controls (including other panels and tables) that this function will have to traverse through to find all the check boxes. Anyone have any ideas how to do this? This is C# by the way.

Answer 1

Simple, also untested. This could be adapted to only collect the controls IDs, but this is a little more reusable and is a great one to have in a common library.

    public static void FindControlsRecursive(Control root, Type type, ref List<Control> list)
    {
        if(root.Controls.Count != 0)
        {
            foreach(Control c in root.Controls)
            {
                if(c.GetType() == type)
                    list.Add(c);
                else if (c.HasControls())
                    FindControlsRecursive(c, type, ref list);
            }
        }
    }

And usage:

var checkboxes = new List<Control>();
FindControlRecursive(pnlCategories, typeof(CheckBox), ref checkboxes);

var ids = checkboxes.Select(c => c.UniqueID).ToList(); // or however you'd like to get them.