Rendering Nested Comments

Question

I typically render comments in a simple repeater.

I have a social app which requires nested comments (being able to comment on a comment).

So I have objects which look like this:

class Comment
{
    public string Body { get; set; }
    public User Creator { get; set; }
    public List<Comment> ChildComments { get; set; }
}

Can I use nested repeaters? Is that even a good idea? Do I need to pre-render the HTML in a recursive loop and send it to a literal?

Not sure what to do with this one.

Answer 1

You could use an HTML source block, then iterate through the comments, adding a <DIV> for each comment begin, then after each comment, call the iterator on the nest list for that comment, then add the closing </DIV>

Answer 2

It sounds like you need to use UserControls here. Make a user control for a comment that knows how to render itself, and has 0...N other CommentUserControls (possibly rendered using a repeater). This effectively ends up with nested repeaters (kinda) but by encapsulating one of the repeaters in a UserControl it should make it less messy.