Question

I have an asp.net UserControl that writes HTML content from a SharePoint list to a Literal control. Currently I insert a title in h5 tags before each SharePoint list item I write to the Literal. Instead of having the title hardcoded to be placed in h5 tags, I’d like to expose a public property of my user control that lets me define the html format for the title. This is a little different from the templated user control questions I’ve found so many of because it’s not really a template for the user control. I just need a string containing html. Here’s what I’m looking to do:

public class MyUserControl: UserControl
{
    public string TitleFormat { get; set; }

    private void ShowContent()
    {
        ...
        string output = String.Format(TitleFormat, title) + someContent;
        ltlOutput.Text = output.
    }
}

In markup:

<UC:MyUserControl id="muc1" runat="server">
    <TitleFormat>
        <a href="www.somewhere.com"><h3>{0}</h3></a>
    </TitleFormat>
</UC:MyUserControl>

How can I set this up?

Answer 1

Here is the answer (provided by Decker Dong in the asp.net forums):

To nest another class into one, you have to declare a new property but
just declare it is an InnerProperty. And set its Design properties.
Now here’s a full sample for you:

[ParseChildren(true),PersistChildren(false)]
public partial class MyUserControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl
{
    [DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Content)]
    [PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty)]
    public string TitleFormat
    {
        get;
        set;
    }

    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }
}

With these attributes you can use the control as written in the question.