Iterating through TextBoxes in asp.net - why is this not working?

Question

I have 2 methods I tried to iterate through all my textboxes in an asp.net page. The first is working, but the second one is not returning anything. Could someone please exp

Answer 1

You need to recurse. The controls are in a tree structure - Page.Controls is not a flattened list of all controls on the page. You'd need to do something like the following to get all values of TextBoxes:

void GetTextBoxValues(Control c, List strings)
{
    TextBox t = c as TextBox;
    if (t != null)
        strings.Add(t.Text);

    foreach(Control child in c.Controls)
        GetTextBoxValues(child, strings);
}

...

List strings = new List();
GetTextBoxValues(Page, strings);