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Passing Information Between Master Pages and Content Pages

I teach two ASP.NET classes through the Extension program at the University of California - San Diego, and one of the most common questions I am asked regarding Master Pages is, “How do I pass information from my Master Page to its content page (or vice-a-versa)?”

For example, in the ASP.NET Programming II class, students create a custom site map provider whose structure is based upon the data in the database. The Master Page contains navigation controls (a TreeView, perhaps, or a Menu) that uses this custom site map provider. The challenge is on administrative pages, where an admin might add, update, or delete the corresponding database data, the Master Page's navigation is rendered before the content page executes its database command to modify the site map structure. Consequently, the page's navigation is not up-to-date immediately after modifying the site map structure (although it picks up the changes on the next postback). This can be remedied by having the content page tell the Master Page, “Hey, you there! I just updated the site map data, so go ahead and rebind the site map data to your TreeView.“

This begs the question, How do you get the content page and Master Page talking? To address this question, I wrote up an article discussing different techniques: Passing Information Between Content and Master Pages.

posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 12:21 PM

Feedback

# re: Passing Information Between Master Pages and Content Pages 2/16/2007 1:01 PM mark

Need to mention that the MoodChanged is alway set to null, so the event does not fire.

# re: Passing Information Between Master Pages and Content Pages 2/18/2007 2:22 PM Ellen

I also find that MoodChanged is null in the example, and in the code I wrote based on the otherwise excellent article.

# re: Passing Information Between Master Pages and Content Pages 2/20/2007 1:50 PM Scott Mitchell

Mark and Ellen: Thanks for the heads up. Yes, I needed to check to see if MoodChanged is null before raising the event in the SelectedIndexChanged event handler.

And it's not ALWAYS null, it's only null if no one's subscribed to the event... in any case, the code and article have been updated.

Thanks again!

# re: Passing Information Between Master Pages and Content Pages 4/13/2007 6:45 AM Aaron Seet

interesting. The first time i was playing with Master pages, I had a need to highlight the correct menu item in the Master page. What I ended up doing was getting the content pages "submit" their menu numbers to the HttpContext via well-defined properties. The Master page would pick up those parameters and do the necessary adjustments at PreRender event.

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