Computer Overlord

Moving the ViewState Hidden Input Control

A page with a heavy ViewState takes longer to load.  A user with a slow conenction (dial-up or GPRS) will be waiting longer for the page to be served.

Additionally, many search engines have a page cut-off length.  I believe Google pretty much stops indexing a page after 100k.  Not that you should have a page that large, but if you have a large page and a large viewstate, google may well be ignoring your content because of your bloated viewstate.

This article from Web Master World, talks of a solution to move the ViewState Input control to the end of the page Form.  It’s in VB.Net, so I converted it to C# here:

// This method overrides the Render() method 
// for the page and moves the ViewState
// from its default location at the top of the page 
// to the bottom of the page. 
protected override void Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
    System.IO.StringWriter stringWriter = new System.IO.StringWriter();
    HtmlTextWriter htmlWriter = new HtmlTextWriter(stringWriter);
    base.Render(htmlWriter);
    string html = stringWriter.ToString();
    int StartPoint = html.IndexOf("= 0)
    {
        //does __VIEWSTATE exist?
        int EndPoint = html.IndexOf("/>", StartPoint) + 2;
        string ViewStateInput = 
            html.Substring(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint);
        html = html.Remove(StartPoint, EndPoint - StartPoint);
        int FormEndStart = html.IndexOf("") - 1;
        if (FormEndStart >= 0)
        {
            html = html.Insert(FormEndStart, ViewStateInput);
        }
    }
    writer.Write(html);
}

One last caveat is that I have zero idea if this helps with search engine indexing, but it will certainly help to make a page appear to load faster for slow connecting users. This is not a solution to the problem of a large view state, but rather a treatment for a symptom.

7am