How to Traverse the Control Tree in Asp.Net with C# 2.0

I couldn’t find any easy way to traverse the entire asp .net control tree using the framework classes, so I decided to write my own implementation.  In the end, I wanted to be able to traverse all of the controls and get all which are of a certain type.  First, the method which traverses the tree:

public static void RecurseControls(ControlCollection controls, FindControlDelegate callback) { foreach (Control c in controls) { callback(c); if (c.Controls.Count > 0) { RecurseControls(c.Controls, callback); } } }

This basically recurses through the control tree and calls a given delegate for each control found.  Here is the delegate:

public delegate void FindControlDelegate(Control control);

To top it all off, here is the method I wrote to find all of the controls of a given type on a page:

public static List<T> FindAllControls<T>(Page page) where T : Control { List<T> controls = new List<T>(); RecurseControls(page.Controls, delegate(Control c) { if(c is T) controls.Add(c as T); }); return controls; }

I am usually not one to use cryptic programming techniques such as inline delegates, but in this case it just made sense.  Otherwise, I would have had to somehow share the object containing the list of found controls between two different methods.

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