They Said It Best

NULLHome computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.
Doug Larson

ASP.NET User Control

ASP.NET User Controls are reusable controls that use the same techniques you would for creating ASP.NET Web pages. You can add existing Web server controls and markup to a user control, and define properties and methods for the control. You can embed them in ASP.NET Web pages where they act as a module. If you ever created a Classic ASP include file then user controls will be easy to understand.

This website is using a ASP.NET User Control to display quotes from famous people from the computer industry. Each time you visit a page on this site you'll see a different famous quote. Our User Control is part of our ASP.NET Master Page but you can put them in any ASP.NET Page. In this lesson you will learn how to create a data driven User Control to display this these quotes. This lesson has the following steps:

Step 1. SQL Server table and stored procedure
Step 2. Create ASP.NET User Control

Step 1. SQL Server table and stored procedure

First we create a table called "quotes". Open SQL Server and open a new query window in your database. Cut and paste the following SQL statement below to create a table called "quotes". This table will store our data about the famous computer quotes that we want to display.

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Quotes](
	[QID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
	[quote] [varchar](500) NOT NULL,
	[author] [varchar](50) NULL,
 CONSTRAINT [PK_Quotes] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED 
(
	[QID] ASC
)WITH (PAD_INDEX  = OFF, STATISTICS_NORECOMPUTE  = OFF, 
IGNORE_DUP_KEY = OFF, ALLOW_ROW_LOCKS  = ON, 
ALLOW_PAGE_LOCKS  = ON) ON [PRIMARY]
) ON [PRIMARY]

You can use Google to search for famous quotes. Manually enter the author and what they said into the table.

After adding some data your table should look similar to this with different quotes and authors naturally.

SQL Table for storing quotes

Next keeping an eye on security and performance we'll create a SQL Server stored procedure called sp_dailyquotes_select to query the quotes from the table we just created. Be sure to assign execute permissions for this stored procedure to the sql login that your web site uses to query the database.

CREATE  PROCEDURE [dbo].[sp_dailyquotes_select] 

AS

select top 1 quote, author from quotes order by newid()

By selecting top 1 and using newid() we'll get 1 random quote every time its run.

Being good programmers we always test our code on the database before hooking it into a web page so manually execute the store procedure we just created in a query window

SQL Server Stored Procedure to query famous quotes randomly.

Next Lesson

In Step 2. ASP.NET User Control we'll setup an ASP.NET page using an ASP.NET User Control to display the results of our computer quotes query.