Refer to an object through a variable...

[RFH Reseller: creativeworks]

with .net can you refer to an asp form object from a variable or part variable.

an example would be with flash you are able to refer to variables or movies clips with the following syntax

_root.["mymovie" + i]_alpha = 100

can i do something in vb.asp to refer to an object in a similar way?

and if you can, does this have a technically title!?

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

I haven't tried this in VB, but have used it in Javascript. I did a quick Google, and think this thread should help:

http://forums.devx.com/archive/index.php/t-71914.html

[RFH Reseller: creativeworks]

Cheers, I'll take a look.

[RFH Reseller: askjim]

In asp.net you can refer to a form variable (post) using request.form("fieldname") or (get) using request.querystring("fieldname") or (post and get) using request.params("fieldname").

Although it may not be necessary to do the above as if your controls on the asp.net page are either html or web controls with the runat=server attribute you can reference the value of the control programatically. This is the prefered method.

[RFH Reseller: creativeworks]

what i'm after is being able to refer to a number of asp.net fields within a loop, for example... (no syntax)


do while i<10

mytextfield[i].text = db("field_value")

loop


can this be done with dot net?

[Staff: Warren Ashcroft]

Can't you use an array or dictionary/collection? To store the variables?

[RFH Reseller: nick]

Could this help?
http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/runtime_eval.asp

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

Try something like this:

 
do while i < 10
 
    dim myTextBox as TextBox
    myTextBox = Page.FindControl("textbox" + i)
 
    myTextBox.Text = db("Field_Value")
 
loop

You could optimize this a bit by putting all the textbox controls in a placeholder and using FindControl within the placeholder such that the code won't have to look through all the controls on the page.

[RFH Reseller: creativeworks]

haven't tried yours yet Sol, but how does it know that's being refered to from a variable rather than an element name?

[RFH Reseller: Sol]

It's the line:

myTextBox = Page.FindControl("textbox" + i)

Page.Findcontrol goes through all the controls within the Page (note that this is not recursive, so if you have a PlaceHolder that holds the textboxes it won't go through that). It looks at the name of each control and compares it to "textbox" + i, and if a match is found it assigns it to that myTextBox variable, so that you can access all the properties etc.

Depending on what exactly you are doing, you could dynamically inject the textboxes to the Page.

This of course runs server side, as if you were doing this client-side I would recommend Javascript and the 'Eval' function.