If I create a UserControl and add some objects to it, how can I grab the HTML it would render?
ex.
UserControl myControl = new UserControl();
myControl.Controls.Add(new TextBox());
// ...something happens
return strHTMLofControl;
I'd like to just convert a newly built UserControl to a string of HTML.
You can render the control using Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter).
Feed StringWriter to the HtmlTextWriter.
Feed StringBuilder to the StringWriter.
Your generated string will be inside the StringBuilder object.
Here's a code example for this solution:
string html = String.Empty;
using (TextWriter myTextWriter = new StringWriter(new StringBuilder()))
{
using (HtmlTextWriter myWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(myTextWriter))
{
myControl.RenderControl(myWriter);
html = myTextWriter.ToString();
}
}
//render control to string
StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();
HtmlTextWriter h = new HtmlTextWriter(new StringWriter(b));
this.LoadControl("~/path_to_control.ascx").RenderControl(h);
string controlAsString = b.ToString();
UserControl uc = new UserControl();
MyCustomUserControl mu = (MyCustomUserControl)uc.LoadControl("~/Controls/MyCustomUserControl.ascx");
TextWriter tw = new StringWriter();
HtmlTextWriter hw = new HtmlTextWriter(tw);
mu.RenderControl(hw);
return tw.ToString();
override the RenderControl method
protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter output)
{
output.Write("<br>Message from Control : " + Message);
output.Write("Showing Custom controls created in reverse" +
"order");
// Render Controls.
RenderChildren(output);
}
This will give you access to the writer which the HTML will be written to.
You may also want to look into the adaptive control architecture of asp.net adaptive control architecture of asp.net where you can 'shape' the default html output from controls.