Question

Ok, I know how to do this, but I want to know if this is the BEST way.

I have a table called ‘Topics’ which has a list of topics(obv). I have a page with about 20 (+/-10) check boxes with all the different topics a user can subscribe to. I figured the best way to do this is to make a control array of check boxes and populate it on page load.

The issue is that the check boxes are in a unique arrangement, should I place them on the page and then dynamically populate them on load? Is that the best way to do it? I’m not too familiar with control arrays.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Define what you mean by ‘should I place them on the page’.

Do you mean Drag’n’Drop them onto the aspx page? If you did that, you have to copies of each one — one set created by the page, and a second created by you which replace the first set.

How do the number of checkboxes vary (’20 (+/- 10)’)? Are they options coming from a database? Are they fixed, but you just don’t know how many yet?

One funkey aspect of ControlCollection, is that a control can only be in one at a time. If you were to try:

 ControlCollection cool = new ControlCollection ();  coll.Add(Page.Controls[0]); 

It will be added to coll, but it will automatically be removed from Page.Controls.

EDITED: (responding to comment) On your codebehind, create the Checkboxes manually (It’s been a while since I wrote WebForm code, so I’m voguing a bit here), and place the in an array (an array shouldn’t have the problem I mentioned about ControlCollection)

CheckBox[] boxes = new Checkbox[20]; for(int i =0; i< 20; ++i) {     boxes[i] = new CheckBox();     // do stuff here     Page.Controls.Add(boxes[i]); } 

Now for the ‘do stuff here’, we need to get them in the right place. There are a number of ways. We can build a <table> around them; we can have <asp:placeholder> controls in the aspx which we add them too; we can set the CSS style position attributes.