a page can have only one server-side form tag

Question

I am using master page and when I run this page, it shows the following error message:

a page can have only one server-side form tag

Answer 1

Does your page contain these

<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1"
Runat="Server">
</asp:content>

tags, and are all your controls inside these? You should only have the Form tags in the MasterPage.

---

Here are some of my understanding and suggestion:

Html element can be put in the body of html pages and html page does support multiple elements, however they can not be nested each other, you can find the detailed description from the W3C html specification:

The FORM element

http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/forms.html

And as for ASP.NET web form page, it is based on a single server-side form element which contains all the controls inside it, so generally we do not recommend that we put multiple elements. However, this is still supported in ASP.NET page(master page) and I think the problem in your master page should be caused by the unsupported nested element, and multiple in the same level should be ok. e.g:

In addition, if what you want to do through multiple forms is just make our page posting to multiple pages, I think you can consider using the new feature for cross-page posting in ASP.NET 2.0. This can help us use button controls to postback to different pages without having multpile forms on the page:

Cross-Page Posting in ASP.NET Web Pages

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...39(VS.80).aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...40(VS.80).aspx

Answer 2

Sometime when you render the current page as shown in below code will generate the same error

StringWriter str_wrt = new StringWriter();
HtmlTextWriter html_wrt = new HtmlTextWriter(str_wrt);
Page.RenderControl(html_wrt);
String HTML = str_wrt.ToString();

so how can we sort it?

Answer 3

please remove " runat="server" " from "form" tag then it will definetly works.

Answer 4

I think you did like this:

<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MasterContent" runat="server">
  <form id="form1" runat="server">

 </form>
</asp:Content>

The form tag isn't needed. because you already have the same tag in the master page.

So you just remove that and it should be working.

Answer 5

Use only one server side form tag.

Check your Master page for <form runat="server"> - there should be only one.

Why do you need more than one?

Answer 6

It sounds like you have a form tag in a Master Page and in the Page that is throwing the error.

You can have only one.