Discovering fields in a webform

[Sanjay Pais]

I need to write an application in C# that can accept a WebForm. I am
assuming the WebForm would need to be accessed in design mode. I need to
recursively iterate through the fields in the form, including the fields in
the web usercontrols on the form.



I am using the .NET framework 2.0 and VS 2005Beta2.



This is what I noticed when the form fields were rendered at runtime



On a Form the fields for example

<asp:TextBox ID="WCTextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>

were rendered as

<input name="TextBox1" type="text" id="TextBox1" />

while form objects contained in web usercontrols (named WebUserControl1 on
the form)

<asp:TextBox ID="WCTextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>

were rendered as

<input name="WebUserControl1$WCTextBox1" type="text"
id="WebUserControl1_WCTextBox1" />



I need to create a unique list of all the form fields application wide to
create text values for them as well as assign security to the individual
elements.



How would I go about achieving this?



Thanks in advance



Sanjay

 

[souri challa]

Sanjay,

When your asp.net page is loaded all the form fileds and any
contiguous text are parsed and built into a tree of control classes.
You can recurse through the control tree, do some type checking for
what you want to do and get/set values.

e.g private void LoopThroughControls(Control control){

for each (Control ctrl in control.Controls){
if (ctrl is TextBox)
(TextBox)ctrl).Text = "Your text";

if (ctrl is WebControl && nosecurity)
(WebControl)ctrl.disabled = true

if (ctrl.Controls.Count > 0) LoopThroughControls(ctrl);


}
}


HTH,
Souri

 

[Sanjay Pais]

Souri,

But what if you wanted to pass the assembly to another application that
wanted to process the form objects via reflection or something along those
lines?

thanks

Sanjay

 

[souri challa]

Sanjay,

Tell me a little more about this other application and what exactly
you're trying to achieve? Are you trying to parse an ASPX page in a
windows or console app? In this case I would still try to use asp.net
environment/classes to dynamically create a page class and parse it.

-Souri

 

[Sanjay Pais]

Souri,

Yes, that is exactly what I was hoping to do. I was writing a console app
that would load the assembly dll and by reflection traverse though the
classes in the assembly and based on the types, perform a set of tasks.
I was actually traveling down that path when I discovered that in .NET 2.0,
the wizard that publishes the pages creates partial dlls which are not
really assemblies, I am trying to figure out how to create the .net1.x style
bin dlls.

Sanjay