Customizing the Calendar control in ASP.NET

Recently I had to work on customizing an ASP.NET Calendar control by adding text to the day cells for my team's Remodelogs project. This proved to be not as straight-forward as I thought so here is what I did in case someone else might want to do the same.


The best place to modify the text in a cell seems to be the DayRender event handler. So the first thing I tried was to just modify the e.Cell.Text property like this:


void Calendar1_DayRender(object sender, DayRenderEventArgs e)
{


e.Cell.Text += “My text”;


}


The main problem was that after adding text to a day cell in the control I wasn't able to select that day by clicking on the day number. Here is what you can do if you still want the select day functionality:


void Calendar1_DayRender(object sender, DayRenderEventArgs e)
{
AddTextToDayCell(e, Datetime.Today, “MyText“);






}


void AddTextToDayCell(DayRenderEventArgs e, Datetime d, string text)


{


if(e.Day.Date == d.Date)


{


string ID = ((System.TimeSpan)(e.Day.Date - new DateTime(2000, 1, 1))).Days.ToString();


e.Cell.Text = "" + e.Day.DayNumberText; //assuming the name of the calendar control is Calendar1.

e.Cell.Text +=text;

}

}

If you want your new text to act as a link to some other URL, you could modify the AddTextToCell function as follows:


private void Calendar1_DayRender(object sender, System.Web.UI.WebControls.DayRenderEventArgs e)
{
AddTextToDayCell(e, DateTime.Today, "MyText", "http://www.msn.com"); //this will add the MyText link to http://www.msn.com to the current day's cell
}

void AddTextToDayCell(DayRenderEventArgs e, DateTime d, string text, string URL)

{

if(e.Day.Date == d.Date)

{

string ID = ((System.TimeSpan)(e.Day.Date - new DateTime(2000, 1, 1))).Days.ToString();

e.Cell.Text = "" + e.Day.DayNumberText;

e.Cell.Text += "" + text;

}

}

Hope you'll find this helpful. Btw, Microsoft is not liable in any way in case you have any trouble after using this code :)