Asp.net div still not accessible after runat="server"

Question

I have a div element in my HTML. I added a id and runat attributes to the element:

<div id="footer" runat="server"> 

After rendering, viewing the HTML shows:

<div id="ctl00_footer">

However, I cannot access it from the page's .aspx.cs code:

footer.InnerHtml += "test";

How do I access that element from the C# code?

Answer 1

you can use FindControl("footer"), and cast it to HtmlGenericControl.

HtmlGenericControl footer = (HtmlGenericControl)FindControl("footer")

Answer 2

One of the reasons can be that you don't have designer file for that page. So you can't access element by it's ID.

Just add class with name [your page name].aspx.designer.cs, open it, remove all code, save it, go to your view and click save - designer must generate code of all elements from your view. After this you can access element by ID.