.net templates which page am I on?

Question

Hi,

I'm curious to know that using .net 2.0 with a master page if there is a way that I can pick up what page I am on so that i can use it to style a tab?

My master page has a nav bar on it, and what I wan to do is:

If the user is, say on the contact page, that the tab for the contact page would be a different color, can this be achieved. I have seen some examples that don't use master pages and of course you can use the encapsulating body tag to signify where you are but this isn't available with a masterpage.

Thanks R.

Answer 1

If you want to change the content on the masterpage from the page (i.e. change the tab color) you should:

In the masterpage, publicly expose a property or method that will change the color of the tab.

i.e.:

public void changecolor(string PageName, string Color){
    switch(PageName){
       case "home":
           this.TabHome.Color=Color;
    }
}

Then put a directive at the top of the aspx page with the masterpage path. Like such:

 <%@ MasterType VirtualPath="~/Site.master" %>

Once this is done, from the codebehind, you can access the masterpage and see its exposed method, then just call this and you're done.

protected void Page_Init(object sender, EventArgs e){
    Master.changecolor("home", "red"); 
}

this way, you won't have to parse pagenames and deal with the maintenance that comes when you try to change the name of the page etc. you will also limit your case statement to the number of tabs, and not the number of pages in your site.

Answer 2

MasterPage though the name sound otherwise behaves like a child to a page that uses it.

Think of it as a UserControl to a page. You can actually access to the Page instance and it's Request property.

Here's an example on how you can use it

switch(Request.Path){
  case "/page1/aspx":
    //dosomething to your tabs
  break:
  case "/page1/aspx":
    //dosomething to your tabs
  break:
  .
  .
  .
  default:
    //dosomething else
  .
  .
  .
}

Answer 3

Create the following method in your masterpage (or helper class) and then add a reference to it in your Page_Load method in the masterpage:

public string GetCurrentPageName() 
{ 
    Uri uri = Request.Url; 
    string[] uriSegments = uri.Segments; 

    string pageName = "";

    if( 0 < uriSegments.Length ) 
    { 
        pageName = uriSegments.Last(); 
    } 

    return pageName;

}

}

That should give you the current filename - you might want to strip out the ".aspx" part of the filename also. I haven't tested this with a QueryString yet so not sure if Last() still returns the filename in that case.

If your tabs are asp.net controls, you can use FindControl() to find the tab - you'll need to match your tab ids with your page names of course. Once you have the control you can add a "selected" style in code-behind.