Using Control State in ASP.NET 2.0

Version: VB 2005
Compatibility: VB 2005
Category: ASP.NET

This article describes a simple approach to maintaining control state in an ASP.NET 2.0 custom web control. Control state is a new construct within ASP.NET 2.0 and it is really nothing more than view state however it is view state with a significant advantage; that advantage is that other developers using your control cannot disable control state as they can view state.

Control state survives even if the developer using the custom control disables view state. The advantage is pretty obvious; in prior versions of Visual Studio, the consumer of a custom control could disable view state; if the control relied on view state to maintain state information, the control would cease to function or at least misbehave. Creating control state removed the ability of a control consumer to disable view state based state management within the control; naturally the control designer may still opt to not use either view state or control state based state management.

One final note, most of the examples I have personally viewed regarding control state show a mechanization in which only one value is stored in the control state; the accompanying example herein shows how store a greater number of values of different data types can be easily stored in the control state.


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