This control also supports templates so that you can completely customize the look and feel of it as desired.įigure 4-2 Wizard control, unadorned, and with SideBar and formatting Figure 4-2 shows two different renderings of the Wizard control: the first is exactly how the Wizard control shown in Listing 4-18 would appear, and the second shows the same control with a different formatting applied and with the ShowSideBar attribute set to true. In the previous example, the control’s SideBar portion, which generates a set of navigation hyperlinks on the left side to let the user jump between steps in the wizard without using the Next/Previous buttons, was not displayed. Like most controls in ASP.NET, both the appearance and behavior of the Wizard control are extremely customizable. Listing 4-18 shows a sample Wizard control populated with the input elements described in Figure 4-1 (also included is an adjacent Label control to display the data on completion). The control itself consists of a collection of WizardSteps which act as containers for any controls you want to add. Instead of laying out the Panel controls yourself and adding the logic to flip the visibility of each panel in response to button presses, you can use the Wizard control to manage the details for you and focus on laying out the controls for each step. In the 2.0 release of ASP.NET this technique has been standardized in the form of the Wizard control. It is also quite efficient, since the contents of invisible panels are not even sent to the client browser just the state of the controls is sent through view state. This technique works well because all of the state for all the controls is kept on a single page, and even when the controls in a particular panel are not displayed, their state is maintained in view state, so programmatically it is just like working with one giant form. When the user selects the Next button in one panel, the handler for that button sets the visibility of the current panel to false and of the next panel to true. Instead of placing input controls on separate pages, you place them all on the same page, but separate them with Panel (or Placeholder) controls as shown in Figure 4-1.
You can achieve the same sequential set of steps for data collection that you can using multiple pages with this technique by toggling the display of various panels, showing only one of several panels at any given time based on the user’s progress. Same Page State ManagementĪnother alternative to storing per-client state across requests is to have the user post back to the same page instead of navigating from one page to another.
The controls include the new Wizard control as well as the View and MultiView controls. This section covers a new collection of controls in ASP.NET 2.0 that simplify the process of collecting data from the user by using a sequence of steps that are all on a single page.
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