Page 215 - DCAP408_WEB_PROGRAMMING

Unit 8: ASP Web Forms

Self Assessment Notes

Fill in the blanks:
10. A client computer requests some needed information from a …………………… computer.
11. …………………… is programmatic code in an HTML file that runs on the browser.

12. The client does not receive any code from server side scripts rather the client receives just
the output of the ……………………

8.4 Building and Processing Web Forms

Understanding how Web Forms are Processed

A Web form is another name for an ASP.NET page. A Web form can be made up of a single file
with an .aspx extension. An .aspx file and a code behind file can be combined to make a Web
form. As we’ll show in the following few days, Web forms can also contain your own custom
controls, defined similarly to .aspx pages, called user controls.
Because a Web form can include HTML, ASP.NET Web controls, custom (user) controls, and code
behind, creating them can get complicated pretty quickly. However, we need to remember only
a few key ideas about ASP.NET page processing so that we can develop and debug effectively.
The first key idea is that much of ASP.NET infrastructure is set up so that a single ASP.NET page
can post form data back to itself repeatedly. This technique is most useful when we divide our
Web site’s functionality into a few main pages.

The second key idea to remember is that all ASP.NET pages are eventually compiled into
executable files by the ASP.NET infrastructure. This means that every time a page is processed
and rendered, a small program corresponding to each Web form is executed by the ASP.NET
infrastructure.

Let’s explore in more detail how Web forms are processed. Listing shows a sample Web form
that performs an English unit to metric unit conversion, and this is shown below.

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