<asp:label> Control Examples

To create the control with the minimum of information needed, you can just supply the runat and
id attributes:

Placed in the context of a web page, the control might look like this:

The id attribute is used to uniquely identify the <asp:label> control so you can refer to it in your ASP.NET code. The runat="server" attribute tells the server to process the control and generate HTML code to be sent to the client.

Let's look at another example. If you want to set the color of a text message to red, you could set it like this:

Alternatively, you can use the text attribute. This way, everything can be contained within the opening tag, in which case you need to close the tag in the following way:

Here, we omit the closing tag, and just supply a closing / to indicate that the tag is closed. Throughout the book, if the tag doesn't enclose any content, then we will use this latter notation in preference to having a closing tag.

The <asp:> prefix indicates that this control is part of the set of built-in ASP.NET controls. It is possible to create custom controls, which have prefixes of the developer's choice. We will look at this later in the book.

Let's now take a look at an example of how we can use the <asp:label> control to display some text at requisite places within our web page. In this example, we'll assume that values of the user's name and the destination they selected on our holiday web site have already been passed across, and that all we need to do is output a message displaying confirmation that we have received the user's details.

1.       Enter the following code in your web page editor:

2.       Save this as labelcontrol.aspx, in your test directory, and view it from your browser:

How It Works

There isn't much to explain here. Our <asp:label> controls fit neatly within the HTML code:

For all intents and purposes the <asp:label> control could be an HTML control. The only thing that differentiates it is the fact that it is executed on the server. The only way you can note this is by checking the underlying HTML source code that is sent back to the browser:

The <asp:label> controls are translated into HTML <span> tags, to which they are functionally equivalent.

Part 1 : HTML Server Controls Part 2 : Simple Web Theory Part 3 : HTML Forms Part 4 : How the <form> Tag Works in ASP.NET Part 5 : Control Examples Part 6 : Control Attributes Part 7 : The asp:dropdownlist Control Part 8 : The ASP.NET Code Part 9 : The asp:listbox Control Part 10 : The asp:dropdownlist Control Part 11 : The asp:radiobuttonlist Control Part 12 : The asp:checkbox and asp:checkboxlist Control Part 13 : Summary Buy Beginning ASP.NET with C# here © Copyright 2002 Wrox Press This chapter is written by David Sussman, et al and taken from "Beginning ASP.NET with C#" published by Wrox Press Limited in June 2002; ISBN 1861007345; copyright © Wrox Press Limited 2002; all rights reserved. No part of these chapters may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, electrostatic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise -- without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.