Enable / Disable nested controls in an Asp.Net User Control

In the post Enable / Disable all controls in an Asp.Net Page, we saw how to Enable/Disable controls in an Asp.net page, there are situations in which we load User Controls in the main page, in these situations the normal approach will not enable/disable the nested/child controls in the User Control, since the user control will be treated as a single control in the asp.net page.

To Enable/Disable the child controls within the user control, we need to iterate through the controls in the user control and Enable/Disable them separately. Identify the control from the page using Page.FindControl(), and pass the control to the EnableUserControls() method.

ucMyControl objMyControl = (ucMyControl)Page.FindControl("ucMyControl");
if (strMode.ToUpper() == "VIEW"))

{

   EnableUserControls(false, objMyControl)
}
else if (strMode.ToUpper() == "EDIT"))
{
   EnableUserControls(true, objMyControl)

}

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

public void EnableUserControls(bool status, UserControl currControl)

{ 
   foreach (Control ctrl in currControl.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;

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Enable / Disable all controls in an Asp.Net Page

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