I have recently come across a number of projects where developers have been leaving their ASPX pages relatively free of markup, in favor of placing all logic inside of ASP.NET user controls. While I understand and respect the use of user controls for enabling code reuse, entire pages built in an ASCX just feels incredibly wrong. I was hoping that this mindset would go away now that ASP.NET MVC is here, but I'm seeing the same pattern, even in new projects.
Am I being overly anal, or does this just smell?
It only makes sense when the user control is actually re-used. These tend to be smaller component parts.
In our case its quite useful for creating bespoke applications that use a subset of usercontrols, this way pages that are not used can just be deleted and managed that way, keeping all the UserControls in one place to use at a later date.
Interesting point - using ASP.NET MVC, I sped up one of our pages by several seconds by removing a user control that was loaded inside a loop - loading the UC takes a noticeable amount of time, which is fine for a single instance, but a pain for multiple.
On MVC I've used a user control to hold a set of fields that I re-use between both the create and edit forms, rather than re-typing; I've also used them in WebForms as self-contained chunks of functionality (file upload controls, message posting, etc).
I agree that there is a smell for single-use controls - in fact I've been guilty of that in the past, and I'm just now going through and starting to remove them.
One useful usage: if you have <% ... %> code blocks on your master page, you won't be able to programatically manipulate the controls. Shunting such code blocks into user controls removes this problem, which we've had to do in one case.
Related
Currently, I have got 7 user controls placed on a single aspx page, some of which are created as Menu, Footer, or Header, etc.
I am just wondering if it's a good practice to always take advantage of web user controls to separate different page components. Would there be any real impact on the performance, e.g. on page load or server responsiveness, etc, if there's relatively large numbers of controls going to be used on aspx pages?
I have also noticed that # OutputCache is an option for caching user controls, so is it good idea to apply # OutputCache for Header, Footer and those kind of user controls?
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
- Donald Knuth.
Do not use output caching, or any other form of optimization unless you have evidence gained from profiling that you need to use it. Output caching is really more to prevent needing to hit a database back-end for commonly-accessed, non-personalized webpages, like a high-traffic frontpage.
There is nothing inherently wrong, performance-wise, with using UserControls - everything gets compiled behind-the-scenes into a high-performance assembly that returns text via an output buffer writer directly. The only "cost" of using a control is an additional vtable call to the Render function, and the extra bytes each control's state uses in-memory. i.e. it's negligible.
During a page's lifecycle, the step that uses the most time is invariably hitting a database or external web-service. Rendering a completed page takes around a millisecond or less. Enable output tracing if you don't believe me.
That said, I question why you're using UserControls for common site areas, like a header and footer - this is what MasterPages are for.
Hello I am trying to lear how to create Dynamic User Controls in asp.net.
I just know that this type of controls are created or loaded at run time.
Someone knows a good tutorial about this topic?
thanks in advance,
The best thing you can learn about dynamic controls in ASP.Net webforms is how to avoid them. Dynamic controls in asp.net are filled with pitfalls. I almost always recommend one of the following alternatives:
Place a reasonable fixed number of controls on the page, and then only show the ones you need.
Figure out the source for the dynamic controls and abstract it out to a datasource (array, ienumerable, list, etc) that you can bind to a repeater, even if it's just a call to Enumerable.Range().
Build a user control that outputs the html you want, bypassing the entire "controls" metaphor for this content.
If you really must work with dynamic controls, it's important to keep the stateless nature of http in mind, along with the asp.net page life cycle. Each adds it's own wrinkle to making dynamic controls work: the former that you need to create or recreate the controls every time you do a postback, and the latter that you need to do this before hitting the page load event - usually in page init or pre-init.
Typically what people are talking about here is the dynamic instantiation and addition of a control to a placeholder.
For example
Control ControlInstance = LoadControl("MyControl.ascx");
myPlaceholder.Controls.Add(ControlInstance);
The above instantiates MyControl.ascx and places it inside of a placeholder with id of myPlaceholder.
I agree with #Joel by knowing the page lifecycle, the stateless nature in mind etc it is possible to avoid the pitfalls. The main things to watch out for, which I have had to do, are:
Page_Init – initialise the controls that are on the page here as they were the last time you rendered the page. This is important as ViewState runs after Init and requires the same controls initalised the same way as the way they were previously rendered. You can load the control using the code from #Mitchel i.e.
Control ControlInstance = LoadControl("MyControl.ascx");
myPlaceholder.Controls.Add(ControlInstance);
Page_Load – Load the content of the controls in here as you would with any control that isn’t dynamically loaded. If you have kept a reference to them in your page_init they will therefore be available here.
Keeping to this structure I haven’t had too much difficulty as this is appears to be the way that ASP.NET was designed to work, even if all the samples on MSDN don’t do it this way. The biggest thing that you then have to watch is tracking what state the page was in in regard to the controls that you have had rendered.
In my case it was take the section number of the multipage survey and reload the questions from the database, so all I had to do was track the currently rendered section number which wasn’t difficult.
Having said all that if you are using dynamic controls just to show and hide different views of the same screen then I suggest you don’t use them. In this case I would much rather use either user controls (with the inappropriate ones hidden), placeholders to mark areas that aren’t to be rendered yet, or separate pages/views etc. as that way you keep the pages to a single responsibility which makes it easier to debug and/or get useful information from the user about which page they were on.
The Microsoft article is very good, but the best article that I have been read is in the bellow link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210330142645/http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/092904-1.aspx
If you are really interested in ASP.NET Web Forms dynamic controls, I recommend that you study the DotNetNuke CMS Portal. DotNetNuke is one of the best cases using dynamic controls as your core feature to build dynamic portals and pages using ASP.NET Portals. It is free for download in www.dotnetnuke.com.
I hope it helps
When creating dynamic controls based on a data source of arbitrary and changing size, what is the official way to track exactly how many controls need to be rebuilt into the page's control collection after a Postback operation (i.e. on the server side during the ASP.NET page event lifecycle) specifically the point at which dynamic controls are supposed to be rebuilt? Where is the arity stored for retrieval and reconstruction usage?
By "official" I mean the Microsoft way of doing it. There exist hacks like Session storage, etc but I want to know the bonafide or at least Microsoft-recommended way. I've been unable to find a documentation page stating this information. Usually code samples work with a set of dynamic controls of known numbers. It's as if doing otherwise would be tougher.
Update: I'm not inquiring about user controls or static expression of declarative controls, but instead about dynamically injecting controls completely from code-behind, whether they be mine, 3rd-party or built-in ASP.NET controls.
This greatly depends on the problem at hand, and the type of controls you're recreating. Are they all simple text boxes or various different complex custom user controls. the main thing here is: if you want your dynamic control to regain state after a post-back, you have to re-create it in the Init phase of a page life-cycle.
Anyway. There's nothing like a Microsoft way or Microsoft recommended way basically. When you're dynamically adding several simple controls of the same type a hidden field with a count would do the trick, but when you have several complex controls other ways would have to be used. You could still hidden fields and save control's full type strings in them (ie. System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox) and re-instantiate them. But think of an even more complex example of putting various controls on different parts in the page... And initializing them to a specific state. That would be a bit more challenging. Hence no Microsoft way... The recommended way is to recreate in Init phase. And that's it.
Everything can be solved, but sometimes one took a wrong direction in the UI and things could be done easier using a different approach.
Additional explanation
This state-full technique of ViewState that Asp.net uses is considered the worse culprit with web developers in general. That's why Asp.net MVC developers think the new framework is bliss since its much more suited to the state-less HTTP protocol. Me being one of them. :D
I'm investigating an asp.net web application that extensively uses User Controls on each page. Most pages contain around 10-20 user controls. The User controls seem to be the visual representation of the business objects (if that makes sense), although at a finer granularity such as each tab of a tab control having its contents in a user control. The project itself has over 200 user controls (ascx files).
The performance of the application is very poor (and the reason I'm investigating). Each event (such as a click or dropdown selection etc) requires about 5 seconds for the page to load (10 seconds whilst in visual studio). The application has no use of Ajax.
Tracing is painful as the aspx pages themselves have no code in the code-behind as the user controls look after all of this, so tracing a single page requires trace statements in all the user controls that are on that page.
I actually think that having each user control look after its business code and being re-usable is a smart idea, but is an excessive use of user controls going to incur a performance hit? Does this seem like the structure of an asp.net application that was written by someone with a strong WinForms background?
EDIT
thought I should add that i'm not questioning the use of user controls (or even the amount) but simply whether having so many on a page that all accomplish things (each user control connects to the database for example) will generally cause performance problems...For example, if just one user control postsback to do something, what about the processing of all the others, some are visible and some aren't...#David McEwing mentioned that he had 40 optimised user controls performing etc, but if the developer was WinForms based or "not familiar with asp.net", then how are they going to make sure each one is optimised...
EDIT2
After getting a sql statement trace, the same calls for data are being executed 5-6 times per page call for each event as the different user controls require data that is not stored commonly e.g. each user control in the tab (mentioned above) makes the same call to populate an object from the database...I'm really not here to accuse user controls of being the problem (should i delete the question?) as clearly the problem is NOT user controls but with the use of them in this particular case...which I believe is excessive!
10-20 (or even hundreds) User Controls alone is beyond trivial. The presence of the controls themselves, and the idea of encapsulation, is definitely not the source of your problems.
It's impossible to say precisely what the problem is without actually profiling the application of course, but based on my experience I can say this:
What is more likely is the specific implementation of the business logic inside each user control is poor. With postbacks taking as long as you describe, each control probably looks back to your DAL for its own data on each request. This can be mitigated by two things:
Make sure user controls cache all their data on first load and never re-load it unless explicitly instructed to (usually by an event from a lower-level service)
Ensure the controls all use a set of common services which can reuse data. E.g. if two controls need access to the customers list, and they are executing in the context of the same request session, that should only require one customer list lookup.
I'll put myself firmly in the camp of folks that suggest there is no hard limit to a number of user controls that should be used on a page. It sounds like application-wide tracing is in order here instead of page-level tracing. It may very well be that a handful of these controls is causing the problem. Heck, it could be a single control causing all the fuss. However, since it's impossible to make any assumption about the level of resource-usage that the "average" (if there is such a thing) user-control takes up, it's likewise impossible to suggest a limit. Otherwise, we'd be able to come up with similar limits to the number of members to a class or the number of stored procedures to a database.
Now, if we're talking about 20 complex user-controls that are each retrieving their own data with each refresh and each with a bunch of sub-controls using ViewState whether needed or not, then yeah, that's a problem. Still, it has more to do with overall design than with there being too many controls. If, on the other hand, they've created a common user control to act as nothing more than the composite of a label to the left of a textbox (or maybe even every combination of label + user-actionable control) and have sprinkled this control throughout the app, I can imagine that you'd get a bunch of these on a page and I can't see why that would necessarily hurt anything.
I take it that you are not familiar with applications which use so many user controls?
It sounds like you may be jumping to the conclusion that this unfamiliar aspect of the application is the cause of the unfamiliar bad performance. Instead of making assumptions, why not try one of the following profiling tools, and find out:
JetBrains' dotTrace
Red-Gate ANTS
Automated QA's AQTime
These can all do memory and CPU profiling of ASP.NET applications.
I believe that one of the key purposes of UserControls is code reuse. That is, if the same functionality occurs on multiple web pages, then it is better to create a UserControl for it. That not only saves the developer from writing (or copying and pasting) the same code to several web pages, but it also makes maintenance much easier. Any change made to the UserControl is implemented automatically everywhere the UserControl is used. The maintenance developer doesn't have to worry about finding all the different places that the code needs changing.
I'm not sure if a single-use UserControl is as effective. They do encapsulate and segreate the code, which is nice on a busy web page.
Can you ascertain whether your UserControls are reused, or are many of them only used once.
I agree with Saunders about doing some profiling to determine the impact certain things have.
Note that you can get some free stress-testing tools for IIS here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840671
I will say, though, that having too many controls is probably not a good thing, IMHO. Without knowing more, I'd tentatively say 20 is too many.
I've got a web application that I'm trying to optimize. Some of the controls are hidden in dialog-style DIVs. So, I'd like to have them load in via AJAX only when the user wants to see them. This is fine for controls that are mostly literal-based (various menus and widgets), but when I have what I call "dirty" controls - ones that write extensive information to the ViewState, put tons of CSS or script on the page, require lots of references, etc - these are seemingly impossible to move "out of page", especially considering how ASP.NET will react on postback.
I was considering some kind of step where I override Render, find markers for the bits I want to move out and put AJAX placeholders in there, but not only does the server overhead seem extreme, it also feels like a complete hack. Besides, the key element here is the dialog boxes that contain forms with validation controls on them, and I can't imagine how I would move the controls and their required scripts.
In my fevered imagination, I want to do this:
AJAXifier.AJAXify(ctlEditForm);
Sadly, I know this is a dream.
How close can I really get to a quick-and-easy AJAXification without causing too much load on the server?
Check out the RadAjax control from Telerik - it allows you to avoid using UpdatePanels, and limit the amount of info passed back and forth between server and client by declaring direct relationships between calling controls, and controls that should be "Ajaxified" when the calling controls submit postbacks.
I recommend that you walk over to your local book store this weekend, get a cup of coffee and find jQuery in Action by Manning Press. Go ahead and read the first chapter of this 300 page book in the store, then buy it if it resonates with you.
I think you'll be surprized by how easy jQuery lets you perform what your describing here. From ajax calls to the server in the background, to showing and hiding div tags based on the visitor's actions. The amount of code you have to write is super small.
There are a bunch of good JavaScript libraries, this is just one of them that I like, and it really is easy to get started. Start by including a reference to the current jQuery file with a tag and then write a few lines of code to interact with your page.
Step one is to make your "dirty" pieces self contained user controls
Step two is to embed those controls on your consuming page
Step three is to wrap each user control tag in their own Asp:UpdatePanel
Step four is to ensure your control gets the data it needs by having it read from properties which check against the viewstate for pre-existing values. I know this makes your code rely on ugly global variables but it's a fast way to get this done.
Your mileage may vary.