ASP.NET C# Properly Generating HTML for Page

Question

I realize this is probably a fundamental thing I should know but I am self-teaching myself C# and asp.net so I am a little lost at this point.

I right now have 2 pages. One is an .aspx (with aspx.cs file included) that is blank and html is generated for it from a Page_Load function in the cs file. The HTML is very simple and it is just an image and some text.

The second file is a shtml file which has lots of things, serverside includes, editable and noneditable areas. I want to put my webapp into this file. My asp.net app uses Response.Write to just write out the html. This does not flow well with this page as all that does is write it at the top of the page which is because it is ran first and generates it at the top.

How can I make it to where I can generate HTML code inside the page, like within a specific DIV so it does not mess up the page. Where would a starting point be in learning how to do that.

I should note that I do not need any interaction from the user. All of this should generate right away.

Answer 1

I don't know how well this would work for you, but could you try using an iframe to house the ASP.NET page? This should keep it in the specified region and not overwriting your shtml file. It may be something to think about.

Answer 2

You can add a Literal control to the page inside the div:

<div>
   <asp:Literal ID="litMarkup" runat=server />
</div>

then in your code-behind:

litMarkup.Text = "<strong>Your markup</strong>";

Answer 3

I think you need to read up on some basic ASP.Net documentation and tutorials. Response.Write is not the correct approach - you need to understand how the ASP.Net page lifecycle works and how WebControls are used to render the html.

ASP.Net tries to abstract away having to create your html manually for the most part.

Answer 4

If it is necessary that you generate your HTML output from C# code, and you would use this in more than one place, I think you may be thinking of something like what are called ASP.NET Custom Controls (not to be confused with "User Controls"-- though you probably could put together a solution with those as well, using a Literal control as another person suggested). The MSDN documentation would be a good starting point. In general, though, the writing-out-HTML-yourself-from-code model (like you would with, say, CGI applications), is not the usual ASP.NET model of development, as it largely defeats the point of using ASP.NET at all. You'd mostly want to do this sort of thing if you are writing your own web control, though this might be exactly what you are doing (hard to tell from the description).

Answer 5

So if i have understood the questions correctly. You already have an existing page/application (the shtml file) that you want to extend with some new ASP.NET components by including output from the ASP.NET page in the existing page?

This is as not something that is out of the box "supported" by ASP.NET and you "won't" be able to execute the aspx page using SSI. But you can do the opposite, an ASP.NET page does support SSI. So if you are not using any other scripts in the shtml file this might be a solution.

Otherwise the only common solutions would be either to use an AJAX framework and let it call the ASP.NET from within the existing pages or to use an iframe solution. In both cases the client will be resposible for making the calls to the ASP.NET pages and merging the results.

And then you have a issue with controlling the output from the ASP.NET page?

The Polymorphic Podcast has a good article on Controlling HTML in ASP.NET WebForms .