Good practices concerning View State

[imaginekitty]

While going through a recent app and disabling view state in the <asp:content> and <asp:panel> controls I was wondering if viewstate is ever necessary on these controls and are there any other controls that don't really require a view state or would always benefit from having it disabled most of the time?

Also, is there a way to apply enableviewstate="false" to all content and panel controls site wide without going through each instance and adding it?

[wwb_99]

Disabling viewstate when not needed is always a good idea. For doing things like this on specific classes of controls site-wide, check out control adapters.

[imaginekitty]

Ah yes, control adapters. Thanks!

There are certain items like <asp:content> and <asp:button> that should have viewstate off by default. Maybe.

[wwb_99]

Really depends on what you are doing with the controls. If the page is just staticly displaying information, you are almost certainly in good shape. But, if you are using web form functionality, you could break something easily. Also remember that the disabled viewstate cascades down. So, if you are doing something in your ContentControl that needs viewstate, you might break it by disabling viewstate there.

[imaginekitty]

Really depends on what you are doing with the controls. If the page is just staticly displaying information, you are almost certainly in good shape. But, if you are using web form functionality, you could break something easily. Also remember that the disabled viewstate cascades down. So, if you are doing something in your ContentControl that needs viewstate, you might break it by disabling viewstate there.

Hmm. It doesn't seem to cascade down from a content control. I have a panel control inside of a content control. The content control is set to enableviewstate="false". If I set the panel control to enableviewstate="false" it loses its listview's content on postback. Removing the enableviewstate="false" form the panel but keeping the enableviewstate="false" on the content control maintains the listview's content.

Am I looking at this the wrong way? Is the content control downstream from the items it contains?

[wwb_99]

Honestly never tried it on the content controls, but it should flow down from panels and/or pages and/or user controls.

[NightStalker-DNS]

Viewstate is a hidden input on the page. So u cannot enable viewstate on one control and disable it on another. I always disable view state unless i need it. If its only needed on a control you could also look at using ControlState instead

[wwb_99]

You can definitely disable viewstate on individual controls. You can also disable it page-wide. If so, no viewstate will work on that page with all the intended and unintended consequences.

[NightStalker-DNS]

You can turn off ViewState on a per-control, per-page, or even per-application basis. You don't need ViewState if:

Pages:
* The page doesn't post back to itself.

Controls:
* You aren't handling the control's events.
* The control has no dynamic or data bound property values (or they are set in code on every request).