Recently I had to work on customizing an ASP.NET Calendar control by adding text to the day cells for my team’s Logon Message project. This proved to be not as straight-forward as I thought so here is what I did in case someone else might want to do the same.
The best place to modify the text in a cell seems to be the DayRender event handler. So the first thing I tried was to just modify the e.Cell.Text property like this:
void Calendar1_DayRender(object sender, DayRenderEventArgs e)
{
e.Cell.Text += “My text”;
}
The main problem was that after adding text to a day cell in the control I wasn’t able to select that day by clicking on the day number. Here is what you can do if you still want the select day functionality:
void Calendar1_DayRender(object sender, DayRenderEventArgs e)
{
AddTextToDayCell(e, Datetime.Today, “MyText“);
}
void AddTextToDayCell(DayRenderEventArgs e, Datetime d, string text)
{
if(e.Day.Date == d.Date)
{
string ID = ((System.TimeSpan)(e.Day.Date - new DateTime(2000, 1, 1))).Days.ToString();
e.Cell.Text = "<a href=\"javascript:__doPostBack('Calendar1','" + ID + "')\" style=\"color:#663399\">" + e.Day.DayNumberText; //assuming the name of the calendar control is Calendar1.
e.Cell.Text +=text;
}
}
If you want your new text to act as a link to some other URL, you could modify the AddTextToCell function as follows:
private void Calendar1_DayRender(object sender, System.Web.UI.WebControls.DayRenderEventArgs e)
{
AddTextToDayCell(e, DateTime.Today, "MyText", "<a href="http://fathir.com/">http://fathir.com</a>"); //this will add the MyText link to <a href="http://fathir.com/">http://fathir.com</a> to the current day's cell
}
void AddTextToDayCell(DayRenderEventArgs e, DateTime d, string text, string URL)
{
if(e.Day.Date == d.Date)
{
string ID = ((System.TimeSpan)(e.Day.Date - new DateTime(2000, 1, 1))).Days.ToString();
e.Cell.Text = "<a href=\"javascript:__doPostBack('Calendar1','" + ID + "')\" style=\"color:#663399\">" + e.Day.DayNumberText;
e.Cell.Text += "<br /> <a href=\""+ URL + "\">" + text;
}
}
Hope you’ll find this helpful.
Internet Explorer – The big blue e with a swirly around it. A nice simple graphic, but not necessarily a mascot. However, with Microsoft’s history of mascots (Clippy, Bob), maybe it’s better they just stick with a letter.
Firefox – A giant fox with his tail on fire attacking the earth. That’s the stuff of nightmares. Not as scary as a communist Godzilla but close. It’s a cool graphic but Internet Explorer has to win something doesn’t it?
