How to find a control in a separate user control in the same page where it is registered

Question

I have two user controls, in one of them I have a textbox, i need to retrieve its value from the second user control which is registered in the same page. How can i do this? I know the following line is wrong.. but i recall it was something like that.

TextBox myText = (TextBox)FindControl["mycontrol"] as TextBox;

Answer 1

If you need to access the value of the second control from the first control

var textBox = this.Page.FindControl("SecondUserControl")
                  .FindControl("tbCardNumber") as TextBox;

Where SecondUserControl is the id given in the page and tbCardNumber is the id given for the TextBox in the second control

If you try to access the TextBox from a page

var textBox = SecondUserControl1.FindControl("SecondUserControl")
                                .FindControl("tbCardNumber") as TextBox;

Where SecondUserControl1 is the ID of the control and you can access it in code behind.

However, you can expose the the value of the text box via a property

public string TextBoxValue
{
   get
    {
        return tbCardNumber.Text;
    }
}

But you would still need FindControl method if you access it via another user control

Answer 2

The code you have should work, except you have too many casts

TextBox myText = FindControl["mycontrol"] as TextBox;

MSDN documentation on FindControl which returns a Control, which is the base class of the Textbox, so this cast should work as long as the control found is a textbox