Get template layout controls by css class. Get and Set layout control html markup

December 01, 2014 Digital Experience

In Sitefinity you can programmatically create a page and populate it with controls. In some cases you might need to get a specific layout control in your page template using the set css class attribute. You might need to change the template layout control markup, as well.

We get the template layout controls and then using a html parser we get the control attributes. This is not a fast procedure but it should not be considered to find and change layout controls programmatically very often.

We get the layout controls and process them:

private static TemplateDraftControl GetLayoutControl(PageManager manager, string @class, TemplateDraft draftTemplate)
        {
            var layoutControls = draftTemplate.Controls;
            foreach (var control in layoutControls)
            {
                var ctrlData = manager.GetControl<TemplateDraftControl>(control.Id);
                var layProp = ctrlData.PropertiesLang.Single(p => p.Name == "Layout");
                var layout = layProp.Value;
                if (!layout.StartsWith("~/") && !layout.EndsWith(".ascx", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
                {
                    var found = TryFindControl(ctrlData, layout, @class);
                    if (found)
                    {
                        return ctrlData;
                    }
                }
                else
                {
                    layout = GetDefaultLayoutControlsHtml(ctrlData, layout);
                    var found = TryFindControl(ctrlData, layout, @class);
                    if (found)
                    {
                        return ctrlData;
                    }
                }
            }
 
            return new TemplateDraftControl();
        }

I have created a helper class containing methods for getting the layout control and getting and setting its markup.

Sample usage:

var manager = PageManager.GetManager();
            var helper = new LayoutControlsHelper();
            var mycontrol = helper.GetLayoutControlFromPage(manager, "MyPage", "customclass");
            if (mycontrol.Id != Guid.Empty)
            {
                var html = helper.GetControlHtml(mycontrol);
 
                // change the html of the layout control
                html += "<span>This is from debug</span>";
                helper.ChangeControlHtml(manager, mycontrol, html);
            }

The full source code could be downloaded from GitHub here.

Nikola Zagorchev

Nikola Zagorchev is a Tech Support Engineer at Telerik. He joined the Sitefinity Support team in March 2014.