Chris May

I was having a problem with some textboxes that I was adding to my control dynamically not retaining their value across postback. These textboxes were of course the ones that I was attaching a whole bunch of code to for a lookup control I am writing, so there was a bunch of stuff going on.

In testing I added another textbox and it DID retain its viewstate w/ no problem.

More debugging and testing and whatnot. In looking at some of the tracing from the postbacks and posts, I saw that it was naming the form element for the newly added test textbox as a generic name "cntl_1" or something like that, whereas the textbox I cared about was "TextField", the ID I was assigning to it programatically. I found that you HAD to give a webcontrol an ID in code in order for it to assign ANY ID to it in the code, which kinda sucks. I really don't care what it's ID is in the HTML, but it would only assign a NAME to it, which doesn't help me in all my javascript programming.

So long story short, I was assigning the ID value of the textboxes in a method that was being called from the prerender event. I guess what was happening was that, in the page lifecycle, it was trying to load the viewstate back into the control, and b/c I hadn't hit the prerender event of course, my textbox didn't have the ID value that was expected.

I moved the ID assignment to the constructor and everything is working fine... so far.