ASP.NET- forcing child/container events to fire before parent onload?

Question

I'm working on a questionnaire type application in which questions are stored in a database. Therefore, I create my controls dynamically on every Page.OnLoad. This works like a charm and ViewState is persisted between postbacks because I ensure that my dynamic controls always have the same generated Control.ID.

In addition to the user control that dynamically populates the questions, my questionnaire page also contains a 'Status' section (also encapsulated by a user control) which represents the status of the questionnaire (choices are 'Complete', 'Started' or 'In Progress'). If the user changes the status of questionnaire (i.e. from 'In Progress' to 'Complete'), I need to postback to the server because the contents of the dynamic portion of the questionnaire depend on the selected status.

Some questions are always present regardless of status, and yet others may not be present at all for the selected status. The point is, when the status changes, I have to postback to the page and render the right set of questions. Additionally, I need to preserve any user entered values for those questions which are 'always available'.

However, due to the page life cycle in ASP.NET, the 'Status' user control's OnLoad, which contains the correct status needed to load the right questions from the DB, doesn't get executed until after the 'dynamic questions' user control has already been populated (with the wrong/stale values).

To get around this, I raise an event from my 'Status' user control to the main page to indicate that the Status has changed. The main page then raises an event on the 'dynamic questions' user control. Since by the time this event bubbles up, the 'dynamic questions' user control has already loaded the 'wrong' questions from the DB, it first calls Controls.Clear. It then happily uses the new status to query the database for the 'correct' questions and does a Control.Add() on each. FYI, Control.IDs are consistent across postbacks.

This solution works...sorta. The correct set of questions for the selected status do get rendered; however ViewState is getting lost for those 'always available' questions. I'm guessing this is because the 'dynamic questions' user control calls Controls.Clear when responding to the status changed event. This must somehow kill the association between ViewState and my dynamic controls, even though the Control.IDs are consistent.

This seems like such a common requirement, I'm virtually certain there is a better, cleaner and less error prone approach to accomplish this. In case its not plainly obvious, I haven't been able to grok the ASP.NET page life-cycle despite working with it for the last year. Any help is much appreciated!

Answer 1

However, due to the page life cycle in ASP.NET, the 'Status' user control's OnLoad, which contains the correct status needed to load the right questions from the DB, doesn't get executed until after the 'dynamic questions' user control has already been populated (with the wrong/stale values).

If you know the client id of the underlying status control, you can get the posted value at any point in the page life cycle by circumventing web forms and directly accessing the posted form data:

// where 'selectedStatus' is the id of the html <input> control the user clicks
string statusString = Request.Form["selectedStatus"];