Multiple Forms in ASP.NET

I realize that ASP.NET is only designed to support a single form. What I am confused about is what is the appropriate method for coding multiple "forms" on a .NET page (I have a login form at the top of the page, via the Site.Master and other forms will appear on any given p开发者_C百科age). Am I supposed to respond differently? It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. I would appreciate it if someone could clarify. Thanks.

P.S. I am currently developing on .NET 2.0 although I plan to move to .NET 3.5 soon.

Nearly all ASP.NET Web Forms post back to the same page. Unless you are working on some strange outlier (which your question doesn't indicate), you just use one form tag around the entire document, and use event hookups to your controls to handle the various instances.

For example, you can have three buttons that act as Submit buttons, one for each "form" but all inside that same form tag, and each one will call its respective event. This behavior is standard and handled by ASP.NET for you; all you have to do is write the event handlers and wire them up.

I'm not sure what you mean by a logon form. Are you doing some special ajax stuff?

You should be dividing any logical "form" as you call it into its own usercontrol.

http://www.asp101.com/lessons/usercontrols.asp

When dealing with aspx pages, think of the form on the page the same way you think of the body tag.

In that case, I would hand-code the login form at the top to submit to a separate login.aspx page. Leave the rest of the page to the other form's own purpose.

by default you can't, it's how the whole webforms technology works (MVC would probobly fix this in the newest versions).

So really it depends on what you want the "two forms" to do. For example, there's no issue with having login & search on one page, as each button has its own click event and go from there. If you wanted a second aspx page to process one of them, you could collect values and pass them through a response.redirect or some other hacky solution.