The Iron Yuppie

Searching for the Unsearchable

Boy, this took a long time. A REALLY long time.

I needed to find out a little bit more about a specific tag in ASP.net. Specifically, the '<%' tag. So why not just drop it in a search engine? All the major search engines block searching for this kind of text. It's an incredible pain.

Fortunately, I was lucky enough to find a term that was always associated with this (in this case databinding) that helped me search for it. After browsing through about a million websites, I finally found someone who had the same problem. Let me hand it over to Tone's website.

http://tonesnotes.org/2004/06/16/aspnet-code-block-mystery

It's remarkably hard to search for syntax like "<%=" if you want to find something that speaks about the syntax rather than all the pages that use it.

I ran into a case where apparently identical code blocks in the same .ascx file were being treated differently. One was expanded and the other was treated as a literal.

The problem ended up being that a "runat=server" attribute had been added to the element with the failing code block.

A normal inline ASP.NET code substitution block uses the syntax <%= … %>.

ASP.NET databinding uses the syntax <%# … %>.

<%@ … %> is WebForms syntax. One of the following must follow the @: Page, Control, Import, Implements, Register, Master, MasterType, OutputCache, Reference

<% … %> executes a block of inline code.

<%= … %> does a Response.Write of the value of inline code.

<%# … %> does data-binding

<%$ … %> is used for configuration file substitutions

Thank you Tone!

D