The PropertyGridEditorPart provides a generic user interface (UI) that enables users to edit custom properties on WebPart and server controls placed in WebPartZoneBase zones. In contrast, the other EditorPart controls, such as the AppearanceEditorPart and BehaviorEditorPart controls, edit only existing, UI-oriented properties from the WebPart class.
Just as there are tool-oriented zones in the Web Parts control set (for details, see the ToolZone class overview), there are tool-oriented part controls, and each of these must reside in a corresponding type of tool zone. These kind of controls in the Web Parts control set have two distinguishing characteristics:
The PropertyGridEditorPart control is a special control, and it becomes visible only when a Web page is in edit mode, and when a specific WebPart or server control has been selected by a user for editing. The PropertyGridEditorPart control, like all other EditorPart controls, must reside in an EditorZone zone on the page.
The PropertyGridEditorPart control provides an editing UI for properties that are marked in the source code with the WebBrowsable attribute (from the WebBrowsableAttribute class). When a property is marked with this attribute, a PropertyGridEditorPart control creates the editing UI based on the type of the property, and uses a PropertyDescriptor object if needed to convert the value in each editing control to the type of the property. You can also add other attributes that help the PropertyGridEditorPart control to display the editing UI. The WebDisplayName attribute (from the WebDisplayNameAttribute class) allows you to specify the text for the label that appears with each control in the editing UI. The WebDescription attribute (from the WebDescriptionAttribute class) allows you to specify a string that appears as a ToolTip for each control in the editing UI.
The controls created to edit properties of various types are listed in the following table.
The PropertyGridEditorPart class has a Title property, which is used to get or set the visible title text for the control. There is also a protected Display property, which determines whether the control is displayed when the page enters edit mode.
The PropertyGridEditorPart class also has two important methods, ApplyChanges and SyncChanges, which it inherits from the EditorPart class and overrides. The methods are critical because they enable getting and setting the property values between the field values of the editor control and the properties on the WebPart control being edited.
Because the PropertyGridEditorPart control allows you to edit only custom properties, you will need the other EditorPart controls in the Web Parts control set to edit the appearance, layout, and behavior of WebPart controls. The other controls include the BehaviorEditorPart, the LayoutEditorPart, and the AppearanceEditorPart controls. These EditorPart controls should provide most editing features required to edit WebPart controls, but if necessary, you can also create a custom editor control by inheriting from the EditorPart class. For a code example, see the EditorPart class overview topic.
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To improve accessibility, the PropertyGridEditorPart control is rendered within a <fieldset> element. The <fieldset> element groups the related set of controls used for editing in the PropertyGridEditorPart control, and it facilitates tabbed navigation among those controls for both visual user agents (such as ordinary Web browsers) and speech-oriented user agents (such as screen-reading software). |
Accessibility
The markup rendered by default for this control might not conform to accessibility standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG) priority 1 guidelines. For details about accessibility support for this control, see ASP.NET Controls and Accessibility.