Background

A popular technique for ASP.NET Web Forms developers for years has been the use of a custom "base page" (http://aspalliance.com/63).  The base page class was a great place to put code that needed to be executed for each page on the web site.  This article discusses a new option to provide the same functionality using the adapter framework.

Sample Project

Download the Visual Studio 2010 project that shows a complete implementation of the techniques described [Download Sample]

Implementation

Create a class that derives from "System.Web.UI.Adapters.PageAdapter".  Override page lifecycle events that you want executed for every page request (like OnInit).  Your code can execute before or after the OnInit of each page depending on where you place your code relative to the call to the original page event (referenced using "base.").  This example shows executing code before the OnInit of the page fires.  Don't forget to call the original event handler!

 public class eventPageAdapter : System.Web.UI.Adapters.PageAdapter
{
    protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
    {
        HttpContext.Current.Response.Write("Adapter OnInit<br>");
 
        //Call this if want to have the corresponding page event fire
        base.OnInit(e);
    }
}

1.    Create a folder named "App_Browsers" in the root of the web site

2.    Create a .browser file (such as "eventPageAdapter.browser") and place it in the "App_Browsers" folder.  The refID attribute refers to which browsers you want to use the adapter for, in this case "Default" means to use this for all browsers.

<browsers> 
     <browser refID="Default">
        <controlAdapters>            
            <adapter controlType="System.Web.UI.Page"
                adapterType="eventPageAdapter" />
        </controlAdapters>
    </browser>
</browsers>

Benefits

There are several benefits of this approach compared to the traditional "base page" implementation.

·         Don’t need to modify each code behind file to derive from the custom base page class (it was not uncommon that developers would miss this step and the base code would not be running)

·         Enable/disable without modifying other code in the site (you can turn on/off the code by simply commenting out the controlAdapters element in the .browser file)

Conclusion

This article explains the benefits of replacing the widely deployed "base page" technique used in ASP.NET Web Forms with a page adapter.  The use of this new approach removes the need for developers to remember to always derive from the custom base page each time they add a new page to the web site.