If I create a UserControl and add some objects to it, how can I grab the HTML it would render?
ex.
UserControl myControl = new UserControl();
myControl.Controls.Add(new TextBox());
// ...something happens
return strHTMLofControl;
I'd like to just convert a newly built UserControl to a string of HTML.
You can render the control using Control.RenderControl(HtmlTextWriter).
Feed StringWriter to the HtmlTextWriter.
Feed StringBuilder to the StringWriter.
Your generated string will be inside the StringBuilder object.
Here's a code example for this solution:
StringBuilder myStringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
TextWriter myTextWriter = new StringWriter(myStringBuilder);
HtmlTextWriter myWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(myTextWriter);
myControl.RenderControl(myWriter);
string html = myTextWriter.ToString();
//render control to string
StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();
HtmlTextWriter h = new HtmlTextWriter(new StringWriter(b));
this.LoadControl("~/path_to_control.ascx").RenderControl(h);
string controlAsString = b.ToString();