Enable / Disable all controls in an Asp.Net Page

Enable / Disable all controls in an Asp.Net Page

In general for Asp.Net forms we maintain different modes like Create mode, View mode & Edit mode.

In the View mode we will disable all the controls to make sure that the user does not, modify any of the details. If the form is small then we can manually set the .Enabled property to false for all the controls in the form to achieve the effect, however if we have a huge form with hundreds of controls then this becomes a tedious task to set the property for each of the controls, in these scenarios we can make use of the Page.Controls collection to loop throught all the controls in the page and Enable/Disable the controls.

Here is the code to enable all the controls in an Asp.net page.

if (strMode.ToUpper() == "VIEW"))

{

    EnableControls(false);
}
else if (strMode.ToUpper() == "EDIT"))
{
    EnableControls(true);

}

Based on the mode VIEW/EDIT we will pass false/true to the EnableControls function, and the same will DISABLE/ENABLE controls in the page.

private void EnableControls(bool ctrlStatus)

{
  foreach (Control c in Page.Controls)
   {
    foreach (Control ctrl in c.Controls)
    {

      if (ctrl is TextBox)

        ((TextBox)ctrl).ReadOnly = (ctrlStatus == true) ? false : true;

        else if (ctrl is Button)

         ((Button)ctrl).Enabled = ctrlStatus;

        else if (ctrl is RadioButtonList)

         ((RadioButtonList)ctrl).Enabled = ctrlStatus;

        else if (ctrl is ImageButton)

         ((ImageButton)ctrl).Enabled = ctrlStatus;

        else if (ctrl is CheckBox)

         ((CheckBox)ctrl).Enabled = ctrlStatus;

        else if (ctrl is DropDownList)

         ((DropDownList)ctrl).Enabled = ctrlStatus;

        else if (ctrl is HyperLink)

         ((HyperLink)ctrl).Enabled = ctrlStatus;

        else if (ctrl is HtmlImage)

   ((HtmlImage)ctrl).Visible = ctrlStatus;
}

   }
}

Notice the we are setting the .Enabled property for all other controls except the textBox control, when a TextBox is disbled the contents in the TextBox will not be clearly visible to the users hence we are setting the ReadOnly property for the TextBox, and this functions opposite to the Enable/Disable

If Enable is set to true then ReadOnly should be set to false
If Enable is set to false then ReadOnly should be set to true

To achieve this we are using a conditional operator to reverse the value for the ReadOnly property.

((TextBox)ctrl).ReadOnly = (ctrlStatus == true) ? false : true;

This logic will work fine for the controls which are placed directly in the form, if the form has a Panel, we need to add another iteration, which will iterate through the controls in the Panel to Enable/Disable the panel controls. Refer to the Post Enable / Disable controls in an Asp.Net Panel, to see how to achieve this. 

That’s it we have Enabled/Disabled the controls of an Asp.net page by iterating through the Page.Controls collection.

Related Post

Enable / Disable all controls in an Asp.Net Page

Enable / Disable controls in an Asp.Net Panel
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