VB.Net User Controls not working in Live

Question

Hi All,

At work we have a pretty large web application that works by having a few pages, with lots of user controls which are nested in these pages. This is working fine most of the time but we have a problem at the moment where one of the user controls isnt working. Originally it was referenced from another project in the solution but when this wasnt working I decided to copy the file into the project and try to register it locally.

It works on our development system, its only when we move it to deployment that it stops working, and I'm thinking it's something that I'm missing in the build. When you go to the page on Live the control is just missing, and no errors are generated.

We are using VS2005 if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

Are you using a web deployment project? If so perhaps it's getting picked up by a build exclusion you've setup like below. You should be able to open your deployment project file and confirm it's not getting picked up here by looking for the following section.

<ItemGroup>
    <ExcludeFromBuild Include="$(SourceWebPhysicalPath)\Test\**\*.*"/>
  </ItemGroup>

Also, are you using SVN/Visual SVN? If so perhaps when you copied the control to your new project you didn't add it to source control as well and it's not getting published to your repository. If you're using Visual SVN this would be as easy as right clicking and the selecting add to subversion.

Without more information these are two things that come to mind as potential issues.

Answer 2

Boy is this embarassing. After many days of attempting to find the issue, I discovered a condition in the code that basically said

If Not FieldSet Then
    lblView.parent.parent.Visible = False
End If

It seemed that the idea the original coder had was if the value that the label was supposed to display wasnt set, then hide that row of the datagrid. Unfortunately what it in fact did was hide the entire datagrid. To fix this I placed an ID for the row in the HTML and then replaced the hide condition so that if the value wasnt found then that row would be hidden.