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Asked: 2026-05-10T18:08:16+00:00

What choices do I have for creating stateful dynamic content in an ASP.Net web

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What choices do I have for creating stateful dynamic content in an ASP.Net web site?

Here’s my scenario. I have a site that has multiple, nested content regions. The top level are actions tied to a functional area Catalog, Subscriptions, Settings.

When you click on the functional action, I want to dynamically add content specific to that action. For example, when Catalog is clicked, I want to display a tree with the catalog folders & files, and a region to the right for details.

When a user clicks on the tree, I want a context sensitive details to load in the details region (like properties or options to manage the files).

I started with UserControls. They worked fine as long as I kept loading everything into the page, and never let one disappear. As soon as one disappeared, ViewState for the page blew up because the view state tree was invalid.

(I didn’t want to keep loading stuff into my page because I don’t want the responses to be too huge)

So, my next approach was to replace my dynamic regions with IFrames. Then instead of instantiating a UserControl, I would just change the source on my IFrame. Since the contents of the IFrames were independent pages I didn’t run into any ViewState problems.

But, I’m concerned that IFrames might be a bad design choice, but don’t fully understand why. The site is not public, so search engines aren’t a concern.

So, finally to my question.

What are my options for this scenario? If I choose an Ajax Solution (jQuery), will I have to maintain my own ViewState? Are there any other considerations I should take into account?

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  1. Some other options:

    1. Content only appears to be dynamic. You load enough controls on the page to handle anything and only actually show what you need. This saves a lot of hassle messing with view state and such, but means your page has a bigger footprint.
    2. Add controls to the page dynamically. You’ve already been playing with this, so you’ve seen some of the issues here. Just remember that the place to create your dynamic controls for postbacks is in the Page_Init() event, and that if you want them to be stateful, you need to keep that state somewhere. I recommend a database.
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