Dynamically Adding Meta Tags in ASP.NET 2.0

A customer asked how to dynamically add meta tags in ASP.NET 2.0 (for more information on HTML meta tags, see W3Schools). I opened up Visual Studio, and started looking for ways to manipulate the header using a clever runat="server" trick with a System.Web.UI.HtmlGenericControl.

It was apparent after just a moment of trying to do this that there had to be an easier way. All it took was going into the IDE and typing "Page." inside the Page_Load handler to inspect the members of the Page class. Yep, there it was… a member called "Header". Here I was about to start using a recursive method to compare types (FindControl uses a control's ID property, and by default the Head element in an ASPX page's markup has no ID).

Once I found the Header property and I saw that it, in turn, had a Controls property… it was then simple to determine if my life had been made even easier with a pre-built class that represents an HTML META tag. Yep… there it is, the System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlMeta class.

The end result ends up so much cleaner than what I originally started doing:

using System;

using System.Web.UI;

using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;

public partial class _Default : Page

{

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

HtmlMeta keywords = new HtmlMeta();

keywords.Name = "keywords";

keywords.Content = "hockey, Thrashers, Atlanta, Phillips";

Header.Controls.Add(keywords);

}

}