ASP.NET Controls - Difference between Unique and Client ID Values

# re: ASP.NET Controls - Difference between Unique and Client ID Values

Well thank you for that nod D'Arcy, I'm blushing hehe, honestly any time I can help...

DOH!! You said Shane Bauer!

hehe, anyway. good post. And here's something to consider with regards to Microsoft's much talked about and upcoming MVC framework. How do you extract the posted form variables in the controller?

Everything works fine right now with the postback mechanism and ViewState. You can find a submitted value by referring to the "Regular ID that's used in the designer". A text control nested inside a repeater control will have a name value of something like 'myRepeater$ctl03$myTextBox' on the client, but the postback framework in winforms today can parse this back into the proper variables and you can therefore use your reference to the repeater in the code behind and query it for the controls it contains, therfore finding your text box value.

In the upcoming MVC framework, the controller is completely separated from the code behind. Obtaining a typed reference just isn't possible anymore. So how does one know to parse something like 'myRepeater$ctl03$myTextBox' out of the submitted form variables?

I've watched guthrie's video a couple of times looking for clues and there are none to be found. He carefully skirts around how they are going to do this. In his example, he writes out native html controls into the view (ie: specifically writes the text [input type="text" name="simpleText" /], instead of using asp controls.

BUT, their claim is that aspx pages can be used as the view technology which means they will have to provide some way to parse those aspx created variable names like 'myRepeater$ctl03$myTextBox' in some meanignful way that can be used in the Controller. Right now, this is a mystery how they will do it.

One easy way might be to not write things like 'myRepeater$ctl03$myTextBox' into the rendered html in the first place and since aspx pages used in the new MCV framework will inherit from ViewPage instead of Page, I suspect this is probably what they will do. It remains to be seen!

Have I gone too deep again? Crap, I hate doing that.


Anyway, I have my own theories and am actually working on some proof of concept code. That's right, I'm going totally egghead on this one :P

We'll see what happens


10/25/2007 12:49 PM | Shaneo