SharePoint User Controls and Web Parts

Fluxtah — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:34:00 GMT

Its common practice to use a user control in a web part via LoadControl(...). By doing this you get the ASP.NET designer experience when working with .ascx files.

After seeing some implementations of encapsulating a user control in a web part, I created a version that uses a generic base class that has the benefits of giving strongly typed access to the user control, the class is as follows.

public abstract class UserControlWebPart<T>
: WebPart where T : UserControl { ///
<summary> ///
The control in the ASCX file ///
</summary> protected T
UserControl { get; set; } ///
<summary> ///
Path to the ASCX file ///
</summary> protected abstract string UserControlPath
{ get; } protected override void CreateChildControls()
{ base.CreateChildControls(); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.UserControlPath))
{ this.UserControl = (T)this.Page.LoadControl(this.UserControlPath); this.UserControl.ID = "uc"; this.Controls.Add(this.UserControl);
} } protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs
e) { base.OnLoad(e);
EnsureChildControls(); } protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter
writer) { if (this.UserControl
!= null)
{ this.UserControl.RenderControl(writer);
} else {
writer.Write("UserControlPath
is an invalid path, it must point to a valid .ascx file"); } }

To use this class you can just subclass it and implement the abstract property to define the path to the ascx file as follows.

public class MyWebPartUserControl
: UserControl { } public class MyWebPart
: UserControlWebPart<MyWebPartUserControl> {     protected override string UserControlPath
    {         get { return "~/_controltemplates/my.user.controls/mywebpartusercontrol.ascx";
}     } }

The MyWebPartUserControl is the code-behind for the ascx file specified for the abstract UserControlPath property, this file requires a fully qualified assembly path to work correctly within sharepoint as follows.

<%@
Assembly Name="My.Assembly,
Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=1234abcd1234abcd" %> <%@
Control Language="C#" Inherits="My.Assembly.MyWebPartUserControl" %>

Sharepoint missing fields in NewForm for custom list definition and content type

Fluxtah — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:38:54 GMT

I created a custom content type and list definition, after upgrading my sharepoint solution I could see the list and content types under the new menu but when creating a new item, the fields were missing from NewForm.aspx

I discovered that it was due to the ContentType definition not having the FieldRefs tag, my content type was defined like this:-

When it should have been like this:-

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SharePoint User Controls and Web Parts

Sharepoint missing fields in NewForm for custom list definition and content type