I am having major trouble with C# and programatically loading user controls with public event handling on the controls. It's more extensively described here: http://pastecode.net/?action=viewpost&tag=956 If someone can tell me what I am doing wrong, or even if what I am trying is simply not possible (something I am finding a lot at the moment but a lot is apparently being fixed for ASP.NET 2.0)

That took a while to go through, and I'm still not certain I understand what you're trying to accomplish, but I'll give it a go anyways.

First let me restate your question in more general terms: You are adding user controls at runtime into a placeholder, and the events for those user controls aren't being fired on postback. Is this the basic idea?

This is why the designers of ASP.Net made the page load method execute before events...To give you a chance to reload controls so their events will fire. The problem is that the browser is sending your page events for controls that don't exist (you added them at runtime the last time the code ran, now they're gone), so obviously their events won't be fired.

What you need to do is essentially recreate (in the page load event) the state of the page to exactly how it was last time you outputted it to the browser. This way the user controls exist, and ASP.NET will fire their events appropriately. In your case, this would involve reloading the user control you loaded last time. Make sure it gets the same ID, name, etc.

You seem to have been pretty close to figuring this out on your own, sorry if you already knew this and I missed the question. If so, try to rephrase in more generic terms and I'll try again.

-SN

I have loaded the user controls back in ok on postback - that's not my problem. My problem is making sure the right user control is being loaded in. Because the events are fired after page load my session variables are not updated so I don't know which user control is supposed to be loaded next. If I then load the requested user control after the postback event handling has done the resulting user control does not have its events (bubbled to the base page) handled because any event handling specified on controls generated after Page_Load seems to be completely ignored!

What I am doing now is essentially bringing the event handling of the previous form in to the Page_Load myself by processing the Request.Form variables before they are supposed to be in my own little way (I run them through a switch case!). That way I get the right user control and it has all the right event handling.

Someone suggested something similar but it didn't work and I improvised from there.

"I have loaded the user controls back in ok on postback - that's not my problem."
I don't mean loading the new user control (the one the user selects) in on postback, I mean the one you had in the page the last time around. So you'll actually load two user controls into the placeholder, the previous one, and the one the user wants to see next.

I don't see anywhere in the page load event where you are loading the control...You need to call a function that checks to see which user control you had in the placeholder the last time around (presumably by checking a session variable of some kind) and loads it in. Then its events will fire.

"any event handling specified on controls generated after Page_Load seems to be completely ignored!"

Exactly...That's what I'm talking about. You have to reload them in page_load for their events to fire. You shouldn't have to do any funky processing of the request.form variables yourself.

Good luck,
-SN