Question

In my web app (asp.net C#) I have menus as “All”, “Education”, “Fun”, “Comedy”. I want when I select All then it should be displayed as current menu, for which I have a CSS class current.

In case of WebUserControls I can do it easily by passing parameter of current page to select as below:

mywebpage.aspx

<uc:header ID="header1" runat="server" selectedMenu="comedy" />

header.ascx (code (c#))

public string selectedMenu
{
    get { return strSelected; }
    set { strSelected = value; }
}

header.ascx (html)

<ul>
   <li><a href="/all/" title="All Videos" <%if (strSelected == "all"){%>class="current"<%} %>><span>All</span></a></li>
   <li><a href="/fun/" title="Fun Videos" <%if (strSelected == "fun"){%>class="current"<%} %>><span>Fun</span></a></li>
   <li><a href="/comedy/" title="Comedy Videos" <%if (strSelected == "comedy"){%>class="current"<%} %>><span>Comedy</span></a></li>
</ul>

When I’ll pass comedy from my webpage to usercontrol then it will select comedy menu. I want to implement the same kind of functionality in case of master pages, could anyone tell me how to achieve this type of facility for master pages.

One way what I feel is to pass a query string parameter http://example.com/all/?select=all, I’ll check on master page_load function if select parameter is “all” or fun or comedy then select corresponding menu. But this is not good, because I don’t want to add an extra query string parameter to my URLs.

Please tell me how to solve this issue.

Thanks

Answer 1

You can access master page properties from your content page after casting the master to the correct type:

public class MyMasterPage : MasterPage
{
    public string MyMenuProperty { get; set; }

    protected void Page_PreRender(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        if (MyMenuProperty == "comedy")
        {
            /* do your menu stuff */
        }
    }
}

public class MyContentPage : Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        var myMaster = Page.Master as MyMasterPage;
        if (myMaster != null)
        {
            myMaster.MyMenuProperty = "comedy";
        }
    }