Creating a Common Copyright Control
With all the cool new things going on in the .NET space some of the fundamental tings can get lost on us. Over the past few months I have decided to tackle what I think is sort of a forgotten aspect of ASP.NET and that is creating Web Controls. When I think about creating ASP.NET web controls I think of one developer,
Miguel Castro AKA DataDude. Miguel recently spent some time with
Carl and Richard on DotNetRocks talking about Web Controls in ASP.NET 2.0. I think that episode sort of gave me some inspiration to start looking at ways I could roll my own web controls. I soon began writing some controls to handle some of the common aspects of just about every web site I create (and I think I have created about 300 .NET sites and applications in the past 6 years).
My first entry today will be a very simple control and will display copyright information you commonly see at the bottom of every page. Sounds pretty simple, but think about it, we generally use this on every site we develop don't we? This control will most likely be used on just about every site I create from now on and save me a few minutes of time on each project. Think about it if I create 100 base pages or master pages in a year, which is not uncommon for me, and saving 5 minutes a page that is over 8 hours or a day of time I might be able to save with this control. It took me about 30 minutes to write and test.
The Copyright control solves a very common problem for me and that is how to keep my Copyright notices current on every page on every site? Going through by hand on January 1 of every year just is not an option. Leaving the static copyright notice just looks dumb and makes visitors think you don't care about the site. The control does a running display of the copyright notice, thus it is a set it and forget it utility control.
The control itself consist of 3 public properties, CompanyName, StartYear and FormatString. The CompanyName represents the company that owns the site or how ever you want to handle that. The start year is the first year value that should be displayed in the Copyright string. Finally I implemented a Format String property to hold a special string that will allow you to somewhat control the display. The StartYear is an important value since the site started at a particual time, a typical Copyright notice includes the first year to the current year.
The FormatString property is optional, but gives you the flexibility to control where the different values are going to be displayed. There are three values the control displays {0 = CompanyName; 1 = StartYear; 2 = CurrentYear}. So if you wanted to just show the © with the years the FormatString would look like "© {1}-{2}". So basically you control what is displayed with standard string format syntax for 3 items.
Imports System
Imports System.ComponentModel
Imports System.Drawing.Design
Imports System.Security.Permissions
Imports System.Web
Imports System.Web.UI
Imports System.Web.UI.WebControls
Public Class Copyright
Inherits WebControl
#Region " Properties "
<DefaultValue("{0}"), Localizable(True)> _
Public Overridable Property FormatString() As String
Get
Dim obj1 As Object = Me.ViewState.Item("FormatString")
If (Not obj1 Is Nothing) Then
Return CStr(obj1)
End If
Return String.Empty '"{0} {1}-{2}"
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
Me.ViewState.Item("FormatString") = value
End Set
End Property
<Themeable(False), Bindable(True), DefaultValue("2000")> _
Public Property StartYear() As String
Get
Dim text1 As String = CStr(Me.ViewState.Item("StartYear"))
If (Not text1 Is Nothing) Then
Return text1
End If
Return String.Empty
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
Me.ViewState.Item("StartYear") = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(value)
End Set
End Property
<Themeable(False), Bindable(True), DefaultValue("")> _
Public Property CompanyName() As String
Get
Dim text1 As String = CStr(Me.ViewState.Item("CompanyName"))
If (Not text1 Is Nothing) Then
Return text1
End If
Return String.Empty
End Get
Set(ByVal value As String)
Me.ViewState.Item("CompanyName") = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(value)
End Set
End Property
#End Region
#Region " Method Overrides "
Protected Overrides Sub RenderContents(ByVal writer As HtmlTextWriter)
Me.AddAttributesToRender(writer)
If (Not Me.Page Is Nothing) Then
Me.Page.VerifyRenderingInServerForm(Me)
End If
Dim text2 As String = FormatString
If String.IsNullOrEmpty(StartYear) = False Then
If String.IsNullOrEmpty(text2) Then
If StartYear <> Now.Year.ToString Then
writer.Write(String.Format("Copyright © {0} {1}-{2}", _
CompanyName, StartYear, Now.Year.ToString))
Else
writer.Write(String.Format("Copyright © {0} {1}", _
CompanyName, Now.Year.ToString))
End If
Else
If StartYear <> Now.Year.ToString Then
writer.Write(String.Format(text2, _
CompanyName, StartYear, Now.Year.ToString))
Else
text2 = text2.Remove(0, "-{2}").Remove(0, "{2}")
writer.Write(String.Format(text2, _
CompanyName, Now.Year.ToString))
End If
End If
Else
writer.Write(String.Format("Copyright © {0} {1}", _
CompanyName, Now.Year.ToString))
End If
End Sub
#End Region
End Class
Finally the control inherits from WebControl so we get all the plumbing for the Apperance, Behavior, etc. properties. This is really cool, so I took advantage of it!
I have included the source code for the control. All you will have to do is compile it, add it to your Visual Studio Toolbox or go about adding it to your web site by hand (but why?). Then you can drag the control onto your page, enter the values for the properties and format it to make it look like you want, save and open it in a web browser. Voila! A common task has now been simplified.
I plan on possibly adding some more properties to the control, and if so I will update things here. I have some more controls I have been working on and plan on sharing here as time warrants. If you have an idea for the control, nothing too hard or asking me to do your job please, drop me a line and let me know. I may takle the problem.
