Whidbey support for HtmlHead, Part III

Note: this entry has moved.

The third interesting observation worth noticing from HtmlHead and co. (that is, HtmlLink, HtmlHead, etc) is that they know nothing about state management… viewstate? what’s that??

The PDC03 bits didn’t include any state management code and the March04 bits still haven’t changed this. Bottom line: if you’re planning to dynamically alter the page title, the links or metadata elements you’re definitively out of luck (well… you can always implemented the code yourself…).

Let’s take for instance the HtmlTitle control: it’s a very simple (really, very simple) control that derives from HtmlControl overriding only two methods (AddParsedSubObject and Render) and adding a property named Text.

The get and set accesors for the HtmlTitle.Text property read and write a private member variable instead of using viewstate as its storage; any changes made will be lost on postback.

                                                            
The same holds true for metadata and links elements, any modifications made at runtime are lost on postback.

All this new support for the head and its child elements is really a very welcomed one, but won’t be of much use without state management implemented. Let’s just hope that state management for these controls is already planned but not there only because March04 is not a feature complete build.