A few months ago, a colleague of mine approached me about page templates in ASP.NET.  I had done this before using page inheritance, so I referred him to a few links that I had collected that offered similar solutions.  He researched the articles, and decided to implement a solution for his client utilizing a page inheritance approach.

 

More recently, this topic had come up again, and I put some more thought into the approach that both my colleague and I had taken.  Although page inheritance provided a solid solution for creating page templates, it was not easy to manage the templates.  Any changes to be made to a page template would have to be made in the code, and the Web application would have to be recompiled in order for the changes to take effect.  So, I decided to develop a solution that streamlined this task.

 

The Page Template Framework for ASP.NET 1.1 builds upon page inheritance, and provides a configurable model for page template development.  Page templates are defined declaratively in an XML file called Page.config, which is deployed with a Web application.  Then, Pages can implement the templates by adding a reference to the Page in the XML file, and setting the TemplateName attribute to the appropriate template.  Moreover, a default page template can be defined so that any page that utilizes the framework (by deriving from the PageBase class) will apply that template.

 

Here’s a sample of what the Page.config file looks like:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<PageConfig>

  <PageTemplates>

    <PageTemplate Name="MainTemplate" IsDefault="true">

      <Controls>

        <Control Path="~/Controls/Header.ascx"

ControlPlacement="BeforeContent" />

        <Control Path="~/Controls/Navigation.ascx"

UniqueName="ctrlNavigation"

ControlPlacement="BeforeContent" />

        <Control Path="~/Controls/MainTemplate/Footer.ascx"

ControlPlacement="AfterContent" />

      </Controls>

    </PageTemplate>

    <PageTemplate Name="DivisionTemplate">

      <Controls>

        <Control Path="~/Controls/DivisionTemplate/Header.ascx"

ControlPlacement="BeforeContent" />

        <Control Path="~/Controls/DivisionTemplate/Footer.ascx"

ControlPlacement="AfterContent" />

      </Controls>

    </PageTemplate>

  </PageTemplates>

  <Pages>

    <Page Path="~/Default.aspx" TemplateName="DivisionTemplate" />

  </Pages>

</PageConfig>

 

Please check out my article at The Code Project for more information, source code and demo project.

 

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/PageFramework.asp

 

Feedback on this is very welcome.  I am open to your thoughts and ideas!