Question

I have had a php site for about 10 years now, and tweaked and tuned it over these years to finally knock it down to a page of common functions, and about 10 content pages.

However, I want to learn .NET. I have touched on .NET at work in the past, but have never dealt with anything as… specific?… as my site there.

…OK, I am babbling, sorry. Bottom line is:
Can/should I be using a function in asp.net where in php I would have a function:

<? DrawMapTable("id", "MapName", "Description.", "Filename", "Players", "MapSize", "Game") ?>

Which would draw a table, such as:

<h3> <a> $mapNameFull </a> </h3><img class='mapImage' src='images/$mapName.png' alt='$mapNameFull' /><p>$mapDescription</p><p><a href='maps/$fileMapName'>Download map: $mapNameFull</a></p>
<table class='mapTable'><tr><th class='mapTableCellBig'> Map Name </th><th class='mapTableCell'> Players </th><th class='mapTableCell'> Dimensions </th><th class='mapTableCell'> Version </th></tr><tr>
<td class='mapTableCellBig'> <a href='maps/$fileMapName'>$fileMapName</a> </td><td class='mapTableCell'> $mapPlayers </td><td class='mapTableCell'> $mapDims </td><td class='mapTableCell'> $mapVersion </td></tr></table>

And if so, how?

ATTEMPT AT A BETTER EXPLANATION:

For example, if I have this in my master codebehind page:

public String SectionBreak()
{
  string sHtml = "";
  sHtml += "  </td></tr>\n";
  sHtml += "  <tr><td class='mainCell'>\n";

  return sHtml;
}

1. How would I call it in, say, default.aspx
2. Is this a horrible thing to do?

Basically, I am trying to get away from using html in my content pages by obscuring it within functions that explain what the html is doing.

But the only way I can think to do this at the moment is to create a load of labels and have an onLoad for each of those labels, which would populate it with the code from, for example, SectionBreak().

Answer 1

In classic ASP.NET you have server side controls which generate HTML fragments. For example when dealing with tables, you could use the GridView control.