SharePoint: Only render a PublishingWebControl field when content is present

Question

I have a publishing site page layout which allows untrained staff to enter news stories into a publishing site on our intranet. The Layout contains several fields which are only required occasionally and when they lack content they leave a big hole in the page design.

Is there anyway to render these fields only when they contain content?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Yes - see this blog post from Andrew Connell. It walks you through writing a custom control to do this.

Answer 2

I have create a new custom lookup field base on your filtered lookup field. It is used to lookup another page in Pages list. Everything go fine when I view item in "Disp

The problem of me is that when I put the lookup to a publishing page. It's alway return "Default.aspx". In debugger , I found that (base.Field) of (this.Field) of control is alway null. So it return "default.aspx" in lookup value.

How can I fix this?