When are controls initialized with their design time values?

Question

Hi

a) Am I right in assuming that only after controls on Master page are merged into the control tree for the Page, can controls ( both those in Master page and in a content Page ) be initialized with their declarative values ( values set during design time )?

b) If my above assumption is correct, then these controls cannot be initialized with their design-time values during Page.PreInit, since during Page.PreInit event stage we’re still able to dynamically set a Master page?! So if that is the case, when are controls initialized with their declarative values? During Init event or…?

thanx

Answer 1

Pages are compiled into .Net classes, so the parsing of the markup actually happens outside of the page lifecycle. By the time a request reaches your Page, the page class has been compiled from the combination of the markup and codebehind.

This is easily verified by just putting a Page_PreInit handler and looking at the properties of a control on the page. You'll see that they are set.

The MasterPage/Page relationship is just a function of how the HTML will get rendered, and the naming containers that everything lives in.

When the actual Page compilation happens is partially a function of how you've set up your project, and partially a function of ASP.Net's monitoring of the files in the application.