Events and Delegates

Many times we come across a situation in which we want to execute a method in parent control on the basis of the event raised by a child control.

Most common scenario which I encountered is, when we are having a child control which is having a clear button. On the click of this clear button of Child Control, we need to clear all the controls on parent control as well.

Please follow the beneath written steps to understand the code.

Create a child control and name it: ChildControl.ascx

In the HTML part of this control, place a textbox and a button control.

<%
@ Control Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="ChildControl.ascx.cs" Inherits="ChildControl" %>
<b>Child Control:</b><asp:TextBox ID="ChildTextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
<br /><br />
<asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" onclick="Button1_Click" Text="Raise Event" />
<br />

Open its Code File: ChildControl.ascx.cs and place the following code in it.

public
partial class ChildControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl
{
   public delegate void ClearDelegate();
   public event ClearDelegate ClearExecuted;
   protected virtual void OnClearControl()
   {
       if (this.ClearExecuted != null)
       {
           this.ClearExecuted();
       }
   }
   protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {
   }
   protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
   {
       ChildTextBox1.Text = String.Empty;
       this.OnClearControl();
   }
}

Step by step explanation to the above code:

  1. Create a delegate "ClearDelegate" which has no parameters and also has return type void.
  2. Create a new Event with the above delegate .
  3. Create a OnClearControl method which will be used to raise the event.
  4. On Button click, we will empty the textbox control available on the child Control and also call OnClearControl method to raise the event in parent control.

This completes our child control.

Now create a new webpage to consume the above created child control and lets say name it as Default.aspx

In the HTML part of this page, place a textbox and a child control created above. Code on Default.aspx will look like this:

<%
@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<%@ Register src="ChildControl.ascx" temp_src="ChildControl.ascx" tagname="ChildControl" tagprefix="uc1" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head id="Head1" runat="server">
    <title></title>
</head>
<
body>
    <form id="form1" runat="server">
    <div>
        <b>Parent Control: </b> <asp:TextBox ID="ParentTextBox1" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
        <br />
        <br />
        <uc1:ChildControl ID="ChildControl1" runat="server" />
        <br />
    </div>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

Code part: Default.aspx.cs

using
System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls; 

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page

{

    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

    {

        ChildControl1.ClearExecuted += new ChildControl.ClearDelegate(ChildControl1_ClearExecuted);

    }

 

    void ChildControl1_ClearExecuted()

    {

        ParentTextBox1.Text = string.Empty;

    }

}

Step by step explanation:

  1. On page load, subscribe a child control's ClearExecuted event and provide it the method of parent form to be executed.  
  2. Create a method with same signature as of delegate on the child control.  
  3. Clear the value in text property of the textbox on parent control.  

In the above way we were able to call a method on the parent control from the child control.

Enjoy Programming.

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