PeopleEditor control and the multiview

I spend quite some hours on this one. Here is my configuration:

– a web part with a multiview control with several views in it

– a few linkbuttons to navigate between views

– one of these views contains SharePoint’s PeopleEditor control

– the web part runs in a SharePoint site

Now, the problem was that the PeopleEditor does not retain its values after more than 2 postbacks. As the multiview triggers postbacks, this cannot be accepted. I searched a lot on the internet, but not much information here.

So, i needed a workaround, which i found by subclassing the PeopleEditor control, and override the "RaisePostDataChangedEvent" and the "OnPreRender" event. In short; i store the selected values in a Session var, and use this same session var to load it in the OnPreRender event. I have chosen Sesson vars instead of ViewState because now, I can access it from anywhere in my application, but ViewState works as well.

Here is the code for the PeopleEditor subclass:

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using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;
using System.Collections;
using System.Web.SessionState;

namespace wpPeopleEditor
{
    public class myPPE: PeopleEditor
    {
            public override void RaisePostDataChangedEvent()
            {
               Context.Session.Remove("sessionvalues");
               Context.Session.Add("sessionvalues", this.CommaSeparatedAccounts);
            }
            protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
            {
                this.CommaSeparatedAccounts=(String)Context.Session["sessionvalues"];
                base.OnPreRender(e);
            }
    }
}

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And, for the fun of it, the code of the web part itself:

================================================================================

using System;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Collections;

namespace wpPeopleEditor
{
    [Guid("e377c0db-7e7b-430b-9935-aa482eb25cd3")]
    public class wpPeopleEditor : System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart
    {
        public MultiView mv;
        public View vw1;
        public View vw2;
        public View vw3;
        public myPPE PeopleEditor1;
        public wpPeopleEditor()
        {
            this.ExportMode = WebPartExportMode.All;
        }

        protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
        {
            this.EnsureChildControls();
            RenderChildren(writer);
        }
        protected override void CreateChildControls()
        {
            mv = new MultiView();
            vw1 = new View();
                Label lbl1 = new Label();
                lbl1.Text = "View1";
                vw1.Controls.Add(lbl1);
                mv.Views.Add(vw1);
            vw2 = new View();
                    PeopleEditor1 = new myPPE();
                    PeopleEditor1.AutoPostBack = true;
                    PeopleEditor1.PlaceButtonsUnderEntityEditor = true;
                    PeopleEditor1.ID = "pplEditor";
                    PeopleEditor1.AllowEmpty = false;
                    PeopleEditor1.SelectionSet = "User,DL,SecGroup,SPGroup";
                    PeopleEditor1.MultiSelect = true;
                    PeopleEditor1.EnableViewState = true;
                vw2.Controls.Add(PeopleEditor1);
                mv.Views.Add(vw2);
            vw3 = new View();
                Label lbl3 = new Label();
                lbl3.Text = "View3";
                vw3.Controls.Add(lbl3);
                mv.Views.Add(vw3);
            this.Controls.Add(mv);
            this.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl("<br>"));
            LinkButton btn1 = new LinkButton();
            btn1.Text = "view 1";
                btn1.CausesValidation = true;
                btn1.Click += new EventHandler(btn1_Click);
                this.Controls.Add(btn1);
            LinkButton btn2 = new LinkButton();
                btn2.Text = "view 2" + PeopleEditor1.CommaSeparatedAccounts;
                btn2.CausesValidation = true;
                btn2.Click += new EventHandler(btn2_Click);
                this.Controls.Add(btn2);
            LinkButton btn3 = new LinkButton();
                btn3.Text = "view 3: " + PeopleEditor1.CommaSeparatedAccounts;
                btn3.CausesValidation = true;
                btn3.Click += new EventHandler(btn3_Click);
                this.Controls.Add(btn3);
            base.CreateChildControls();
        }
        void btn1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            mv.SetActiveView(vw1);
        }
        void btn2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            mv.SetActiveView(vw2);
        }
        void btn3_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            mv.SetActiveView(vw3);
        }

    }
}

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As you can see, everything is neat and clean in the MyPeopleEditor class itself; no need to get/set stuff in the parent control.

Have fun with it!