Access Masterpage control on a basepage using FindControl - asp.net

Question

I have an ASP.NET website application on .NET 4.0. There is one Masterpage that contains the header and footer for all the aspx pages. The content comes from the individual aspx pages. I have BasePage.cs which all the aspx pages inherit from.
Now to the problem:
I have a HTML Select control on the masterpage, whose value I am trying to retrieve in the BasePage.cs using the below code
string language = ((System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlSelect)Master.FindControl("cmbLanguage")).Value;
I am using this inside the InitializeCulture method, which would set the Culture info for the website.
protected override void InitializeCulture()
{
string language = ((System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlSelect)Master.FindControl("cmbLanguage")).Value;
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture =
CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(language);
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = new
CultureInfo(language);
base.InitializeCulture();
}
While debugging, I can see that the expected value is set in the language variable. The problem is when the page renders, the content inside the ContentPlaceHolder for the aspx page is not being rendered.
I can see that it is the code involving FindControl which is the cause, because if I set the language to a string, everything works as expected.
string language = "de-DE";
What am I doing wrong?
UPDATE:
If there is some content on the ContentPlaceHolder on the MasterPage, then it gets rendered instead of the page ContentPlaceHolder.

Answer 1

InitializeCulture is called before even PreInit in the page life cycle, which means the controls haven't been setup, and the Value of that control is likely coming through as an empty string.
You need to likely change how the culture is read, through a cookie, session value, or some other method. I'm not familiar with doing it, so i don't have a great suggestion or best practice.

Answer 2

As Doozer correctly noted that control is unlikely to have the correct value set up into it at the time of InitializeCulture. I will suggest that you read the value from POST data in the request and back it via some default value. For example,
string language = Request.Form[Master.FindControl("cmbLanguage")).UniqueID];
language = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(language) ? "de-DE" : language;

Answer 3

In order to access MasterPage controls its better to use MasterType directive. When used you are going to be able to access master page in a strongly typed way. In this case you will be able to create a property on master page like this:
public string SelectedCulture
{
get
{
return cmbLanguage.Value
}
}
And on page itself you will be able to run code like this:
protected override void InitializeCulture() {
string language = this.Master.SelectedCulture;
}