Rendering a custom control to a string object

[RM]

I have a "Custom Control" that takes a DataTable for a property and on
..Build(); renders a table showing products in cart, subtotals and the
like. Being a custom control, it of course has an HTML ascx, and a .cs
codebehind. 99% of the time it's used on various pages of a website.

I would like to be able to instantiate this control only in code (which
I can do now), Build it and then obtained the output HTML to a string.
The idea is to obtain the HTML and use it in an order confirmation
email. I'm not sure quite how to go about doing this.

I hope that makes sense. Basically what I'm saying is, I know how to
instantiate a custom control in code (C#) but Im not sure how to force
it to render and capture the rendering to a string so I can graft that
HTML into something else im building with a StringBuilder in code.

Thank you!

 

[Teemu Keiski]

Hi,

here is an exanple. it's done in VB because I happened to have VB IDE open
while I saw your post. Just add semicolons to the end of the statements,
correct object instantiation to C# way and you are pretty much done.

'LOGICAL PLACE FOR THIS CODE IS ONPRERENDER
'For this demo instantiated here but normally you'd fetch it (the control)
from Controls collection
'TextBox for example complains if RenderControl is called and it isn't
contained
'inside a server-side form so this line wouldn't work as such
Dim t As New TextBox

'Create a StringWriter
Dim swriter As New IO.StringWriter

'Create HtmltextWriter that writes to StringWriter
Dim htmlWriter As New HtmlTextWriter(swriter)

'Make the control to render itself
t.RenderControl(htmlWriter)

'Get the HTML a s string
Dim html As String = swriter.ToString()

'Close the writers
htmlWriter.Close()
swriter.Close()

 

[RM]

Thank you for this. : )