when do you need .ascx files and how would you use them?

Question

When building a website, when would it be a good idea to use .ascx files? What exactly is the .ascx and what is it used for? Examples would help a lot thanks!

Answer 1

ASCX files are server-side Web application framework designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages.They like DLL codes but you can use there's TAGS You can write them once and use them in any places in your ASP pages.If you have a file named "Controll.ascx" then its code will named "Controll.ascx.cs". You can embed it in a ASP page to use it:

Answer 2

It's an extension for the User Controls you have in your project.

A user control is a kind of composite control that works much like an ASP.NET Web page—you can add existing Web server controls and markup to a user control, and define properties and methods for the control. You can then embed them in ASP.NET Web pages, where they act as a unit.

Simply, if you want to have some functionality that will be used on many pages in your project then you should create a User control or Composite control and use it in your pages. It just helps you to keep the same functionality and code in one place. And it makes it reusable.

Answer 3

If you have a block of code+html that appears on several pages and is sort of independent of that page (say a block of latest news items), you could copy/paste the code to every page.

It is however better to put that code in its own block and just include that block on every page that needs it. That "block" is an ascx file.

Answer 4

Ascx-files are called User Controls and are meant for reusability and also for making complex aspx-pages less complex (lift out some part of the page). They could also be beneficial for something called donut caching, that is when you would like to cache a certain part of a page.

Answer 5

One more use of .ascx files is, they can be used for Partial Page caching in ASP.NET pages. What we have to do is to create an ascx file and then move the controls or portion of the page we need to cache into that control. Then add the @OutputCache directive in the ascx control and it will be cached separately from the parent page. It is used when you don't want to cache the whole page but only a specific portion of the page.

Answer 6

When you are building a basic asp.net website using webcontrols is a good idea when you want to be able to use your controls at more then one location in your website. Separating code from the layout ascx files will be holding the controls that are used to display the layout, the cs files that belong to the ascx files will be holding the code that fills those controls.

For some basic understanding of usercontrols you can try this website