Net include file

A User Control is a self-contained "pagelet" which is what they were initially referred to as which consists of some html perhaps, server controls and a code-behind file in which associated logic can run. They have a. Once created, they can literally be dragged from the Solution Explorer on the right hand side of Visual Studio, and dropped onto the designer where they are to appear within a page. Here's a simple control that contains and Image control and a Literal:.

When I run the whole thing in the browser, you can see Master Page, Child page, and user controls all working together please excuse the garish css :. As a classic ASP developer, I collected several libraries of code over time which has all sorts of utility code within them - string functions that determined if a user supplied email address was in a valid format, something that generated html select lists DropDowns from databases, another one that tidied up html from rich text boxes etc.

I also had some pieces of code that needed to run on every page, such as connection initialisation and closing. NET framework offers a number of ways to manage these kinds of things in a cleaner manner than classic ASP.

We'll take a look at the concept of a Base Page first. NET is fully object oriented, it supports inheritance. I already mentioned that each page you create is a class that inherits from System. As a result, it inherits all the properties, methods and events of System. A Base Page is a kind of shim within this inheritance hierarchy. And it's simple to create. You don't have to call it BasePage - you can call it anything you like, but BasePage is the convention:. Notice one thing in particular - the bit after the colon.

This new class inherits from System. Page, and as such, it inherits all the methods, properties events etc from the Page class just as a web form does. If you make your web forms inherit from BasePage instead of Page, they will still acquire all these properties, members, events etc, but they now get them from BasePage, which in turns gets them from Page. However, you can now add code to BasePage, and ensure that any page that inherits from it will cause that code to run.

We just need to modify ChildPage to inherit from BasePage:. Other uses for the BasePage include setting the page title, or some meta content such as keywords or a description. If you want to run some code that times the total execution of all your pages, this is also the kind of place to put that. So far I have looked at methods that can be included in every page, because they are required to run as part of every, or a selection of pages.

The other types of functions are utility functions that need to be available to any page in the site, but might only be used by a few of them. A typical example is a method that replaces newline characters with their HTML counterpart. This type of method is independent of any object, so the best way to create it is as a static shared in VB method, and to place it in a static class:. But if you place the file in any folder and then click the file to select it, hit F4 to bring up the Properties panel and change the Build Action to Compile, you should be able to reference it in code behind.

If you wanted the method to act on the user input provided via a TextBox control, it would look like this:. However, a neater way to do this kind of thing if you are working with ASP. NET 3. These allow you to effectively "extend" existing types with their own behaviour. A relative path begins with the directory that contains the including file. If you have a file in the html directory, and the file "header. If the file containing this include statement is not in the html directory, the statement will not work.

In the sections above we have used the file extension ". Notice that if a user tries to browse an INC file directly, its content will be displayed. If your included file contains confidential information or information you do not want any users to see, it is better to use an ASP extension.

The source code in an ASP file will not be visible after the interpretation. An included file can also include other files, and one ASP file can include the same file more than once. Feedback will be sent to Microsoft: By pressing the submit button, your feedback will be used to improve Microsoft products and services.

Privacy policy. The included files can also contain include directives, and other directives. This allows you to share template code and boilerplate text between templates. In addition, specific Visual Studio extensions can specify their own directories to search for include files. These additional include folders might depend on the file extension of the including file. For example, the DSL Tools include folder is only accessible to including files that have the file extension.

For example:. You might want to use another extension such as ". This is because, when you add a. You do not usually want included files to be transformed individually.