How do I get the HTML output of a UserControl in .NET (C#)?

Question

If I create a UserControl and add some objects to it, how can I grab the HTML it would render?

ex.

UserControl myControl = new UserControl(); myControl.Controls.Add(new TextBox());  // ...something happens  return strHTMLofControl; 

I'd like to just convert a newly built UserControl to a string of HTML.

Answer 1

You can render the control using Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter).

Feed StringWriter to the HtmlTextWriter.

Feed StringBuilder to the StringWriter.

Your generated string will be inside the StringBuilder object.

Here's a code example for this solution:

string html = String.Empty; using (TextWriter myTextWriter = new StringWriter(new StringBuilder())) {     using (HtmlTextWriter myWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(myTextWriter))     {         myControl.RenderControl(myWriter);         html = myTextWriter.ToString();     } }