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How to display an ASPX in another ASPX's DIV dynamically at runtime?

Answer 1

+1 A:

As far as I know, barring the use of iframes, there is no way to load one aspx page into another.

With postbacks or ajax, you can use UserControls (ascx) instead. They can contain pretty much the same content a page can anyway, or use a MasterPage.

If you wish to have no postbacks, ajax is probably the way to go, though again, it does not allow you to load an aspx page into another, only to change the content of the page you're on (amongst other things).

I'm not sure about other platforms for web development though, they may have a solution closer to what you want to do, so if asp.net is not a "must", you should consider checking out other platforms.

SirDemon 2010-01-20 05:34:59

So, if Page99 is instead a User Control, this "embedding" can be done at runtime when the Button is clicked by using AJAX? [Could you point me to some examples you know of, because I have not been able to find any specific information about doing so (found info about includes, but thats not going to work in my case).]

Liao 2010-01-20 05:46:02

@Liao - You should read up about UpdatePanel : http://www.asp.net/Ajax/Documentation/Live/overview/UpdatePanelOverview.aspx

SirDemon 2010-01-20 05:58:59

I read a bit about it, but not much; will do more reading on that (apprently it's slow in some cases).

Liao 2010-01-20 06:05:50

Answer 2

A:

Maybe I'm missing something. But you can use UFrame in this case.

http://msmvps.com/blogs/omar/archive/2008/05/24/uframe-goodness-of-updatepanel-and-iframe-combined.aspx

Mehdi Golchin 2010-01-20 05:37:33

UFrame still uses an iframe, which was not an option according to the question.

SirDemon 2010-01-20 05:40:11

@SirDemon, UFrame does not use IFrame as Omar mentioned in this article. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/uframe.aspx

Mehdi Golchin 2010-01-20 07:10:09

Answer 3

+2 A:

If you don't want to use the iFrames, you can very well use Object element of HTML. Follow here to see and html example. You can very well use this for aspx also with some change, like using OnClientClick property for aspx button etc.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"&gt;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>mouseover image position</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8" />

<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/
body
   {
    background-color:#aaaaff;
   }
#one
   {
    position:absolute;
    left:50%;
    top:50%;
    margin:-150px 0 0 -250px;
   }
object
   {
    width:500px; 
    height:300px; 
    border:solid 1px #000000;
   }
 /*//]]>*/
</style>

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
// written by: Coothead
function updateObjectIframe(which){
    document.getElementById('one').innerHTML = '<'+'object id="foo" name="foo" type="text/html" data="'+which.href+'"><\/object>';
}

//]]>
</script>

</head>
<body>

<div id="one">
<object id="foo" name="foo" type="text/html" data="http://www.w3schools.com/"&gt;&lt;/object&gt;
</div>
<div>
<a href="http://www.google.com" onclick="updateObjectIframe(this); return false;">this is an object test not an iframe test</a>
</div>

</body>
</html>

Rajeev Ranjan Lall 2010-01-20 05:51:29

That's great and super simple! As an aside, when things have a simple solution, sometime you wonder "could it be so easy!". Is there any pitfall/caveats you can think in this approach?

Liao 2010-01-20 06:05:04

Answer 4

A:

I would think that you could do this using AJAX and a web method on the server.

The button(s) on the page calls the web method using AJAX, with various arguments for the correct page to load into the DIV. The web method loads the correct page using a normal web request.

Eg:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://servername/filename.aspx");
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

Then the method would return the HTML generated by the ASPX file back to the client. When the client gets the callback, it can un-encode the HTML and put it into the div.

Eg:

var startOfHTML = response.indexOf('&lt;');
var endOfHTML = response.indexOf('</string>');

response = response.substring(startOfHTML, endOfHTML);
response = response.replace(/&lt;/g, "<");
response = response.replace(/&gt;/g, ">");

var div = document.getElementById("myDIV");
div.innerHTML = response;

Coxy 2010-01-20 05:59:56

I guess that could work; but I suppose the approach will not work if Page99 had Web controls on it. Am I right?

Liao 2010-01-20 06:07:19

You would end up trying to insert multiple html, body and head tags into the page. The viewstate field would be duplicated too so posting back would likely not work any more, and as you correctly point out, and control on Page99 would (if it works) cause the whole page to postback, and the necessary postback information would certainly not get routed back to page99, but instead would end up with the parent page (probably causing a "The control tree into which viewstate is being loaded must match the control tree that was used to save viewstate during the previous request" error)

Martin Booth 2010-01-20 06:20:27

@Martin, very good points. I had assumed based on the lack of frames that the 'child' pages were to be quite basic. The question has since been updated.

Coxy 2010-01-20 06:47:34

Answer 5

+1 A:

If you're using the AJAX toolkit it should be possible to do this using a webcontrol rather than an ASPX page.

If you try to pursue this idea using ASPX pages, and without using an iframe, you will find that there is no isolation provided for javascript variable names and element ids, therefore almost guaranteeing conflicts if you put the rendered aspx's content into a div using innerHTML; The page will definitely not be able to perform a partial postback as I imagine you would like.

Using a webcontrol instead: A better solution would be to install the AJAX toolkit if you haven't already, and use an updatepanel control. Either dynamically load and unload webcontrols inside this panel (using LoadControl()), or place a Multiview control inside it and change the activeview to simulate changing this content.

The updatepanel will allow its contents to update without a full postback (page refresh).

Martin Booth 2010-01-20 06:07:07

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How to display an ASPX in another ASPX's DIV dynamically at runtime?

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