Can I stop .NET eating IDs?

Question

I\'m an Information Architect and JavaScript developer by trade nowadays, but recently I\'ve been getting back into back-end coding again. And, whilst trying to get an HTML

Answer 1

Personally, I use a set of methods I have developed for bridging the server-side ASP.NET "magic" (I have yet to use the MS MVC stuff yet) and my client-side code because of the munging of the IDs that happens. Here is just one that may or may not prove useful:

public void RegisterControlClientID(Control control)
{
   string variableDeclaration = string.Format("var {0} = \"{1}\";", control.ID, control.ClientID);
   ClientScript.RegisterClientScriptBlock(GetType(), control.ID, variableDeclaration, true);
}

So, in your server-side code you simply call this and pass in the instance of a control for which you want to use a friendlier name for. In other words, during design time, you may have a textbox with the ID of "m_SomeTextBox" and you want to be able to write your JavaScript using that same name - you would simply call this method in your server-side code:

RegisterControlClientID(m_SomeTextBox);

And then on the client the following is rendered:

var m_SomeTextBox = "ctl00_m_ContentPlaceHolder_m_SomeTextBox";

That way all of your JavaScript code can be fairly ignorant of what ASP.NET decides to name the variable. Granted, there are some caveats to this, such as when you have multiple instances of a control on a page (because of using multiple instances of user controls that all have an instance of m_SomeTextBox within them, for example), but generally this method may be useful for your most basic needs.