page templates driving me to the brink of suicide -- asp.net webcontrols

Rob Mayo
11/21/2003 10:05:58 AM

OK, I have done this and to get EVERY bit of this to work like you want, =
it may take some work.

I have a PageTemplate class which inherits from Page, and then my pages =
inherit from it.
What it does is=20
Creates a Form control,
Removes ALL the controls from the page's Controls collection, strips =
out certain values and holds them temporarily,
Creates a Table control
Loads UserControls (which are specified through properties at design =
time) for a banner, menu, and left column into cells of the Table,
Takes all the held Controls and adds them to the Table cell that =
displays the content of the page,
Adds the cells (banner, menu, left column, content) to the Table,=20
Adds the Table to the Form,
then RENDERS IT ALL!!! :)

'Build my new controls from scratch

'(FORM)
'
' Template Table
' |---------------------|
' | Banner |
' |---------------------|
' | Menu |
' \---------------------\ |-----|-------------|
' \ \ | Le | Content |
' \ \ | ft | |
' \ Content subtable --\----> | | (Control |
' \ \ | Col | Collection) |
' \ \ | umn | |
' \---------------------\ |-----|-------------|

I remove all the controls from the existing page, then add them to my =
class' form because if I just added the page's content to my table and =
rendered the table, the form would only contain what whas in the page, =
making any active content in the template pieces impossible.

Does this sound like something you're trying to do? If so, reply back to =
this thread.

[quoted text, click to view]

Colin Young
11/21/2003 10:08:13 AM

I'm attaching the page template I use. It allows me to design the page,
although you do need to manually delete the header, body and html tags (i.e.
you will only have the content of the page in the HTML view).

I have header and footer custom controls that emit the HTML to define the
header and footer of the page. The ones I use read in a file from disk that
contains the HTML fragments which allows me to easily modify the look of the
page without recompiling.

I will also echo the comment that CSS is a far better choice for layout than
tables. Table should be reserved for presenting tabular data, not
controlling presentation. See www.alistapart.com or http://tinyurl.com/vzf5
(link to Amazon.com).

Colin

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Jeff
11/21/2003 9:38:03 PM

Here is a link to an article that talks about a different approach to
creating page templates:
http://www.smartisans.com/articles/vb_templates.aspx

This approach is similar to the Master Pages concept MS is creating in
ASP.NETv2.

Jeff

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Colin Young
11/24/2003 10:05:42 AM

I guess they took a look at the proliferation of articles on creating page
templates and decided they had better do something about it.

That article has a good set of links at the end to other articles on page
templates. I used information from almost all of them to come up with my
solution.

Colin

[quoted text, click to view]

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asp.net webcontrols : page templates driving me to the brink of suicide