Web form User Control

Question

Hello all,
I have created a simple web page with 4 cascading dropdowns that pulls its data from a web service and it is functioning nicely. 
I will probably need this functionality on a few different pages so I thought it might make sense to encapsulate this into a User Control.  From the my research it seems like this might not be an easy undertaking, and a User Control cannot access a
web service.
Any suggestions/advice on this topic would be greatly appreciated.
Warren
Warren M

Answer 1

Some are taking the easy way out and pointing you toward ASP.NET only forum, but I believe you can effectively achieve a solution to your problem using only C#, as ASP.NET is just an API for web control control classes defined in C#.
You should create a base user control class inheriting the user control class, and then define a method in the base user control class to create your objects and populate them.  Encapsulation 101.
Here is a somewhat abstract example of how you could achieve this.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
namespace WebApplication1
public class BaseUserControl : System.Web.UI.UserControl
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
protected void PopulateDropdowns()
// Logic to retrieve data and populate controls
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
namespace WebApplication1
public partial class MyUserControl : BaseUserControl
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
base.PopulateDropdowns();
You wouldn't have to put it into a separate method, you could get away with putting it in Page_Load of the BaseUserControl class, but I separated it out for demonstration purposes.
Best of luck.