MaterPage re-design in asp.net. how to create diff layouts for header and footer

Question

I am being told to re-design MasterPage. My company uses AbleCommerce system and let me tell you its very tricky. I have a different layouts templates created in HTML by AbleCommerece long time ago and now i need to re-design my masterpage.

ex:

OneColumn.html

<div id="wrapper">
      [[layout:header]] 
      <div id="Content">
            <div id="MainContent">
                  [[layout:content]]
            </div>
      </div>
[[layout:footer]]
</div>

RightSidebar.html

[[layout:header]]
<div id="outerContentWrapper">
    <div id="innerContentWrapper">
        [[layout:content]]
        [[layout:rightsidebar]]
    </div>
</div>
<div id="footerbar">[[layout:footer]]</div>

MasterPage:

only one ContentPlaceHolder in MasterPage

  <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PageContent" runat="server">
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>

ContentPage

<cb:ScriptletPart ID="ShowProduct" runat="server" Layout="One Column" Header="Standard Header" Content="Show Product Page" Footer="Standard Footer" Title="Show Product" AllowClose="False" AllowMinimize="false" />

Now, Content Page looks for One Coulmn.html and loads the html then One Column Loads the Standered Header.html page which reference header webuser control and layout loads Show Product Page.html page which reference another set of webuser controls and so on..

Issue: by following this design we now have over 100 html files which references Asp.Net UserControls. So whenever we want to create new page on our website, we have to create .aspx and then include **<cb:ScriptletPart>**, create new set of HTML files and then USerControls.

I want to get rid of this system and Load userControls directly inside the .aspx page, that's easy BUT then i dont know how can i inform masterpage to use One Column Layout OR anyother Layout.

Is there way to tell masterpage from content page to use the layout sepcified by public property in content page. OR anyother suggestion to deal this kind of situation.

Answer 1

To access controls within the master page, there are two approaches:

By means of public properties and methods

If you observed, the content page doesn’t have the header and title tags.

So if we want to modify the title of the content page –and this is obligatory- we need to access the title tag.

Primarily we need to change the title tag so it is accessible from the code page.

Simple, we need to add id and runat attributes as follows:

<title id="sometitle" runat="server"></title>

Then, in the master page, add this property:

public string SomeTitle
{
  set
  {
    sometitle.Text = value;
  }
}

And finally within the content page, we add this snippet on the Load event.

MasterPage masterPage = MasterPage)this.Master;

masterPage.mainTitle = "Hello World";

Please Note:

Because the Master property returns a reference of type MasterPage, we need to cast it to MasterPage type. We can avoid this by adding the @MasterType directive in the content page as follows:

<%@ MasterType TypeName=" MasterPage " %>

MasterPage myMaster =this.Master;

I hope that helps.