I have been converting one of my side projects from ASP.Net WebForms to ASP.Net MVC. In order to reuse some of my existing ASP.net UserControls from WebForms in ASP.Net MVC, I tweaked a rending method found here and here.
I improved on these methods by enabling the caller of the utility function to be the one to set properties on the UserControl in a strongly typed fashion. The is no reflection or any other special interface needed on the user control. The key was adding a callback.
Here is what it looks like to call and render the control to a string by the caller. In this example I am rendering my GoogleMap UserControl to a string. The last argument I am passing is an anonymous method that is called by the utility function to initialize my control.
UIUtil.RenderUserControl<GoogleMap>("~/UserControls/GoogleMap.ascx",
uc =>
{
uc.CollegeToShow = CollegeToShow;
uc.Height = Height;
uc.Width = Width;
uc.Mode = Mode;
});
