Anything similar to WPF's ValueConverters for ASP.Net ?

Question

After doing a project with WPF and getting very much attached to it's excellent databinding capabilities, I have now moved back to ASP.Net and am starting to miss some of WPF's stuff.

My question is...is there anything similar to WPF's ValueConverters for ASP.Net?

For example, I want a UserControl to expose a public property which is an IEnumerable<int> and the user can enter such from the source:

<asp:MyControl1 runat="server" ID="something" TheList="1,3,5,7"/>

And then the value in TheList will be converted to an IEnumerable<int>, with something like a ValueConverter of WPF's.

[Update] Solution

Thanks to Nathan Baulch's mention of a TypeConverter, I got across this question and I managed to build a string to list converter.

Answer 1

I think not. My best guess is implicit conversion from String to IEnumberable, which in general is a very bad thing, but would work in your case.

Everything in the markup is always treated as String, unless put in <% %> - then it is being interpreted.

What else you could do is to define IEnumerable DataSource control. Then MyControl would have TheListDataSourceID from where it will take the IEnumerable data.

<asp:MyControl1 runat="server" ID="something" TheListDataSourceID="myDataSource" />

<asp:MyIEnumerableDataSource runat="server" ID="myDataSource" TheList="1,3,5,7" />

Then the IEnumerableDataSource would do the conversion and would return IEnumerable for the user control wanting it. Much better case than the implicit conversion.

Answer 2

I would recommend you take a look at System.ComponentModel.TypeConverter.

This article on CodeProject includes an example that is quite similar to yours involving latitude and longitude strings.