Go Beyond the limits of ASP.NET Form

Introduction

One of the most common hitches that ASP developers encounter when they first approach ASP.NET is that managed Web applications must be written according to a single-form interface model. In the single form interface model each page always posts to itself by default using the POST HTTP method. The HTTP method and the target frame of the post can be programmatically adjusted using ad hoc form properties—Method and Target. The final destination of the postback can't be changed in any way. You can correlate the terminologies a single-form interface to the single-document interface (SDI) and multiple-form interface to the multiple-document interface (MDI) in client server.

Following is the description found on MSDN regarding the limitation.

“The action attribute is always set to the URL of the page itself. The action attribute cannot be changed; therefore, you can only post back to the page itself.” (ref: Goto definition on MSDN )

This article is to illustrate the limitation of the ASP.NET Form control, which doesn’t provide the facility of submitting data to other pages or sites.

Let’s consider a situation where either: 
a) We want perform a search on google.com with search criteria from a asp.net Web Page
b) Or we want to look at current stock quote of a Company listed on NASDAQ or NYSE by submitting information from an ASP.NET web page.
We cannot fulfill above requisites in currently available UI related controls in asp.NET.

This article is concentrating on the aspects of providing the Action property to a server-side form object based on the very own HtmlForm class itself which further can be extended to adopt multiple-form interface.

Source: CodeProject