Setting imageURL using a function in ASP.NET

Question

Hi, I've done this task before within repeaters and it has worked. However I can't get the below to work for me in a normal webforms page. The images appear as broken links and breakpoints I put in the codebehind are not triggered.

(in the aspx file)

<asp:ImageButton ID="ImageButton1" runat="server" ImageUrl='<%# GetImageDirectory()%>btnRunReport.png'  />

(codebehind)

public string GetImageDirectory()
{
    return "~/App_Variants/LBSX/images/";
}

This is the second method I've tried, in the other one I tried passing the imagename through as a string, and it would return the entire link that way. Still no luck!

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[EDIT] Thanks for the help everyone. In the end after the handy hints I found a recursive snippet which did the trick as follows:

private void UpdateImages(Control Parent)
{
    foreach (Control c in Parent.Controls)
    {
        ImageButton i = c as ImageButton;
        if (i != null)
        {
            i.ImageUrl = "~/App_Variants/LBSX/images/" + i.ImageUrl;
        }
        if (c.HasControls())
        {
            UpdateImages(c);
        }
    }
}

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    UpdateImages(Page);
    ...

Hope it helps someone else.

Cheers

Answer 1

Your syntax is for data binding, <%# %>. If you are just trying to do inline c#, you should use <%= %>.

Answer 2

First, just like Zachary mentioned, you're using the code block for data binding.

Second, as you've already tried, using an inline expression (<%= %>) won't work either in your case, since you can't use an inline expression for any property of a server-tag.

What you could do instead is defining an image button using HTML syntax, omitting the runat="server" tag, and use the inline expression to get your image's URL:

<input type="image" src="<%= GetImageDirectory() %>btnRunReport.png" name="image" />

What an inline expression does is, it calls Response.Write() with the value between <%= %> as the parameter, e.g. <%= this.MyVar %> is Response.Write(this.MyVar).