TIP OF THE DAY : Override the tag in a webcontrol

For my New Years Resolution, I'm going to try and start blogging more both here and on my company blog. As a result, I'll most likely revert to these small babies -- Tip of the Day. Hopefully these posts can be short and sweet.

 

Here's the background on this one. I was writing a control that I needed to be the focus of a particular page. I really didn't like how the default base tag of the WebControl class (to write your own control in the assembly rather than use a UserControl) was a SPAN. I really wanted it to be a div. Turns out there is a property you can override in the WebControl class called TagKey.

 

Here's how you can override it for a div.

   1:  //C#
   2:   
   3:  protected override System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriterTag TagKey{
   4:          get { return HtmlTextWriterTag.Div; }
   5:  }

   1:  'VB
   2:   
   3:  Protected Overloads Overrides ReadOnly Property TagKey() As System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriterTag
   4:    Get
   5:      Return HtmlTextWriterTag.Div
   6:    End Get
   7:  End Property

The property type is of type System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriterTag. So you can do other tags beside div and span. You can check that property out on this MSDN doc page.



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Published Tuesday, January 01, 2008 3:11 PM by zowens
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Comments

# TIP OF THE DAY : Override the tag in a webcontrol

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Tuesday, January 01, 2008 3:14 PM by DotNetKicks.com

# re: TIP OF THE DAY : Override the tag in a webcontrol

You can override it as you are doing, since it's only a property getter and not settable. However, normally what you would do to set Tagkey, is, via one of the WebControls constructor overloads. One of those overloads takes a tagkey. What i do normally is :

public class MyWebControl : WebControl

   {

       public MyWebControl()

           : base(HtmlTextWriterTag.Div)

       {

       }

   }

Tuesday, January 01, 2008 3:38 PM by alessandro

# re: TIP OF THE DAY : Override the tag in a webcontrol

It's really the same thing... yours just uses the constructor to do the lifting other than OO inheritance. Either way... it works.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008 3:59 PM by zowens

# re: TIP OF THE DAY : Override the tag in a webcontrol

Nice tip

Tuesday, January 01, 2008 10:09 PM by adminjew

# re: TIP OF THE DAY : Override the tag in a webcontrol

Actually I was looking for a way to do this the other day... Easier than I thought1

Wednesday, January 02, 2008 5:18 AM by Shannon Carver

# re: TIP OF THE DAY : Override the tag in a webcontrol

Interesting, though I would encourage most people to implement their own WebControls and in fact not inherit from WebControl but rather from Control since WebControl is just dragging too much hassle along.

Like for instance this one; ra-ajax.org/.../Ajax-Accordion.aspx

is inheriting from my own base class, overriding RenderControl and purely built without the Font, Border, BackgroundColor properties which is a huge gain since it removes the redundant hassle from the WebControl class...

Sunday, August 31, 2008 4:51 AM by Thomas Hansen

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