ASP.NET 2.0 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Most applications use a common HTML design for the majority of their pages, and in the past, developers have conceived many techniques to reduce the replication of the identical HTML in the application pages. However, none of those techniques met the primary goals of providing the HTML in one place or made it easy for non-technical personnel to edit the HTML.

ASP.NET 2.0 provides a new approach with master pages that comes close to meeting these primary goals. Master pages contain all of the common HTML, server controls, and code that would normally be replicated in some fashion in the application pages. You place one or more content placeholders in the master to reserve the space for page-specific content. Content pages provide the content specific to the page and need only reference the desired master page. When a user requests a content page, ASP.NET merges the output of the master page with the output of the content page, resulting in a page that combines the master page layout with the output of the content page.

This chapter provides four recipes for master pages. These include a quick master/content recipe to familiarize you with the technique. Next, we show how to extend a master page’s content to include content for other application pages, which you might want to do, for example, when you want your login page to have one appearance and the pages that follow it to build on that appearance. The third recipe describes how to set the master page for pages within a folder structure without having to set the master page for each content page explicitly. This is handy when you want to use the same master page for the majority of your content pages but change to another master page as needed without having to edit all of the pages in the application. The last recipe describes how to set the master page programmatically, which provides the ability to change how the application appears at runtime; this approach is useful when you want to change the appearance of the rendered pages based on the season or client branding of some sort.

In addition to showing you some useful techniques for using master pages, the recipes found in this chapter serve to provide the consistent appearance for all the recipes in the book. In particular, you will see that we use Recipe 1.1’s ASPNetCookbookVB.master master page in all the recipes in the book, saving us from having to repeat considerable HTML formatting in all the recipes, something that we were unable to do in the previous edition of this book, which focused on ASP.NET 1.x.