Need a suggestion. User control or Web Form?

[Hugo Flores]

Hi,

The system that I'm building has some conditions, which will tell me
which page to show at that time.

My first thought was to have a table of controls in my DB, which will
have a column for the path of a control. This way, a web form would
query the table to know which control it has to load.
However, I gave it a second thought, because in theory, one must use
user controls, only when you are going to re-use it somewhere else (not
my case). That is why I need to know, if instead of having user
controls, I should instead use web forms (my DB table would still be
the same, with the path to the web form), and instead of having a web
form which loads the control, I would simply do a Redirect to the web
form that resulted from my query.

I just want to know if my first option of using user controls is poor
design (because, they are not being re-used) and is better to just use
web forms. Or is having user controls, and not re-using them not really
poor design. What do you suggest?

Thanks

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

I've tried the user control approach you proposed before, and I must say it
really didn't work out very well for a variety of reasons.
I'd say you should go for more of a Front Controller design pattern and
redirect the user to the appropriate page based on the current state.

Here's more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnpatterns/html/DesFrontController.asp?frame=true