Composite Controls

The third way to create a custom control is to combine two or more existing controls. In the next example, you will act as a contract programmer and we will act as the client. We’d like you to build a more complex control we can use to keep track of the number of inquiries we receive regarding our books.

As your potential client, we may ask you to write a control that lets us put in one or more books; each time we click on a book, the control will keep track of the number of clicks for that book, as shown in Figure 15-14.

To start, add to C15_UserControls a new web form called BookCounter.aspx. The complete listing for the content file is shown in Example 15-10.

Book counter

Figure 15-14. Book counter

Example 15-10. BookCounter.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"
   CodeFile="BookCounter.aspx.cs" Inherits="BookCounter" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="OReilly"
   Namespace="CustomControls" Assembly="CustomControls" %> <!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 runat="server"> <title>Book Counter</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <div> <div> <OReilly:BookInquiryList ID="bookInquiry1" Runat="Server"> <OReilly:BookCounter ID="Bookcounter1" Runat="server" BookName="Programming ASP.NET" /> <OReilly:BookCounter ID="Bookcounter2" Runat="server" ...

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