What is the method for accessing an HTML control with hyphens in its ID?

I am currently facing a dilemma while converting my front end written in HTML to ASP. The issue arises because many controls have names with "-" in them, causing significant headaches as there is no time to rename everything. Using "ctrl-f" and replace breaks the CSS somehow. Is there a way to access these controls in the code behind even when they contain dashes? I have attempted the following code snippets.

// Attempted to find control without dash, but it disrupts CSS after replace operation
HtmlGenericControl body = (HtmlGenericControl)this.Page.FindControl("page-list");
body.Attributes.Add("class", GlobalVariables.webAppSkin);

// Tried this approach as well, but 'logout' remains null
WebControl logout = (WebControl)Page.FindControl("logout-link");

Here is the HTML control in question:

<body id="page-list">
c#htmlcssasp.net.net

Answer №1

Unfortunately, that's not going to work out.

An element with an id containing "-" cannot be used as a runat="server" ASP.NET control.

According to Microsoft's documentation on control IDs:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.control.id.aspx

Only alphanumeric characters and underscores ( _ ) are allowed in this property. Using spaces or other invalid characters will result in an ASP.NET page parser error.

If you attempt to add runat="server" to the body tag like this: <body id="page-list">, it will generate the following line in aspx.designer.cs:

protected global::System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl page-list;

This will lead to an exception in C# syntax.

Answer №2

<body id="page-list"> as a HTML Control since it does not have the necessary attribute runat="server". Adding this attribute would result in a JIT compile-time error message indicating that "page-list" is not a valid identifier.

Although ASP.NET Web Forms 4.0 introduced the ClientIDMode attribute, it does not provide an option to set a completely custom ID attribute value easily. To work around this limitation, one may resort to using <asp:Literal> or creating a custom control. Alternatively, transitioning to ASP.NET MVC could be a more preferable solution.

Answer №3

If you include the attribute runat="server", you can access controls in the code behind using their ID. Here's how you can do it:

<div runat="server" id="exampleID">

In the code behind, you can access it as follows:

example.Attributes.Add("data-type", value);

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