Guru's Challenge: How to place multiple instances of a control in a single page in an abnormal situation

[.Net Newbie]

I am relatively new to .Net and have been coding an intranet site for my
employer for a couple of months. I am currently stuck coding in a
text-editor called EditPlus without access to the VS.Net IDE, and coding
pages with the script directly in each page (not using the codebehind
method) as most of my learning material has demonstrated. I started with
the IBuySpy Portal (SDK version not VS Version) as my base portal and have
coded custom controls and pages within the portal.

My employer recently requested that I change one of my pages so that at a
click of a button a section of code, including roughly 23 asp WebServer
Controls, can be repeated so that the user can enter multiple sets of the
same information into one SQL Server table when they save the information on
the page (along with the main information in another table). I had already
designed the tables with this in mind, however I am having some problems
with getting the .Net code to function correctly. The way the original page
was designed was that when a user clicked on one of three different buttons
in this section in question the cooresponding popup window was called which
loaded a lookup(aspx) page. When the user clicked on a hyperlink in the
lookup page the 23 controls on the main page were populated from SQL Server
tables (via JavaScript) and the popup window closed. Although I'm sure
there's a better way to do it, I used JavaScript to pass the variables back
to the main window because I knew how to do it. Since the change request
came in have I moved this section of 23 controls into an ascx file, removed
the popup windows(lookups), and am able to call it with the click of a
button. Into a table column formatted as follows: <td id="ContentPane"
colspan="2" runat="server"></td>

Unfortunately, my method has left me no way to reference the controls or get
the popup windows to function correctly. Each one of the newly displayed
controls have names like _ctl1:Phone, _ctl2:Phone, _ctl3:Phone, etc for each
time I add the control. Furthermore I am not able to retain information in
a given control instance. The way I currently have the code designed is
that a counter increments everytime the "Add" button is pressed. This
determines the number of times to add the control by looping through the
following code:

Control parent = Page.FindControl("ContentPane");
PortalModuleControl portalModule = (PortalModuleControl)
Page.LoadControl("Children.ascx");
parent.Controls.Add(portalModule);

Everything I have read indicates that I need to have this control inside
some container such as a datagrid or datalist in order to reference it
correctly. However all of my efforts have met with failure. The biggest
problem I have is that I don't even know if what I am trying to do can be
done much less how to do it. If anyone has any idea how I can get this
functioning correctly and/or how I can reference each new control instance,
while limited by my current coding environment
please, please, please, let me know.

Thanks in advance,

Jeff

[Jared]

Newbie,
I don't quite know if I understand what you are trying to do, but... You
have 23 controls that make up a single record? You want to be able to add
multiple instances of the same 23 controls to a single page so a user can
insert multiple records at once, right? Are your 23 controls inside of a
custom usercontrol? Datalist? Datagrid?
You may have to post some of your relevent code for someone to help.

You may look creating a new datatable,dataset object (.Net) and create a new
row, then, update the database after the user is finished.

Jared

".Net Newbie" <jcrumble@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:OPX4lpYdEHA.1048@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl...

>I am relatively new to .Net and have been coding an intranet site for my
> employer for a couple of months. I am currently stuck coding in a
> text-editor called EditPlus without access to the VS.Net IDE, and coding
> pages with the script directly in each page (not using the codebehind
> method) as most of my learning material has demonstrated. I started with
> the IBuySpy Portal (SDK version not VS Version) as my base portal and have
> coded custom controls and pages within the portal.
>
> My employer recently requested that I change one of my pages so that at a
> click of a button a section of code, including roughly 23 asp WebServer
> Controls, can be repeated so that the user can enter multiple sets of the
> same information into one SQL Server table when they save the information
> on
> the page (along with the main information in another table). I had
> already
> designed the tables with this in mind, however I am having some problems
> with getting the .Net code to function correctly. The way the original
> page
> was designed was that when a user clicked on one of three different
> buttons
> in this section in question the cooresponding popup window was called
> which
> loaded a lookup(aspx) page. When the user clicked on a hyperlink in the
> lookup page the 23 controls on the main page were populated from SQL
> Server
> tables (via JavaScript) and the popup window closed. Although I'm sure
> there's a better way to do it, I used JavaScript to pass the variables
> back
> to the main window because I knew how to do it. Since the change request
> came in have I moved this section of 23 controls into an ascx file,
> removed
> the popup windows(lookups), and am able to call it with the click of a
> button. Into a table column formatted as follows: <td id="ContentPane"
> colspan="2" runat="server"></td>
>
> Unfortunately, my method has left me no way to reference the controls or
> get
> the popup windows to function correctly. Each one of the newly displayed
> controls have names like _ctl1:Phone, _ctl2:Phone, _ctl3:Phone, etc for
> each
> time I add the control. Furthermore I am not able to retain information
> in
> a given control instance. The way I currently have the code designed is
> that a counter increments everytime the "Add" button is pressed. This
> determines the number of times to add the control by looping through the
> following code:
>
> Control parent = Page.FindControl("ContentPane");
> PortalModuleControl portalModule = (PortalModuleControl)
> Page.LoadControl("Children.ascx");
> parent.Controls.Add(portalModule);
>
> Everything I have read indicates that I need to have this control inside
> some container such as a datagrid or datalist in order to reference it
> correctly. However all of my efforts have met with failure. The biggest
> problem I have is that I don't even know if what I am trying to do can be
> done much less how to do it. If anyone has any idea how I can get this
> functioning correctly and/or how I can reference each new control
> instance,
> while limited by my current coding environment
> please, please, please, let me know.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Jeff
>
>