Question

Let’s say I have an a .ascx user control. How do I get its HTML markup into a string?

Answer 1

Once you use the LoadControl() method to get it into a page, you can can get the HTML by calling the Render() method on it. It requires an HtmlTextWriter to write to, but it’s fairly straightforward to construct:

var userControl = (userControlType)Page.LoadControl( ....ascx);
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
StringWriter SW = new StringWriter(SB);
HtmlTextWriter htw = new HtmlTextWriter(new StringWriter(sb));
userControl.RenderControl(htw);

string html = sb.ToString();

If you’re not inside the page context, there are other ways to do it.