ASP.Net Wizard Control, DataBinding, ViewState and PostBacks

If you set turn page's ViewState off, then there is no way for you to enable ViewState for specific components. This is because ViewState is serialzed recursively, so when if the Page is not allowing ViewState, it will not serialize the ViewState for any of it's child controls.

In answer to your question, if you don't want to explicitly turn ViewState off on individual controls, but want to keep some controls ViewState aware, the best way would be writing a small utility method which turns ViewState off for all controls (using recursion or otherwise). Then enable ViewState for the controls that you would like to enable ViewState for.

Alternatively, a middle ground and less forceful way may possible if controls are groups inside other container controls (such as Panel). You can disable ViewState for all controls inside a Panel by disabling ViewState of the Panel.

What you've done sounds reasonable.. Can you be more specific about the problem you are having?

One thing about the wizard control, as your workflow gets more and more complex I think the coupling between your workflow state and the wizard SelectedViewIndex becomes problematic. For this reason I eventually separate them. I will usually use a state/statemachine pattern, where the current workflow state is used to determine the appropriate wizard view index (but not vice-versa).

If you're looking for examples on how to implement a state machine, I have a test app out there that walks through dialogs like a wizard control, except using javascript. Check out http://main(dot)test.wishpot.com/WaveDataCollection.Frank/, after you get to the page CollectSamples.aspx, go ahead and view source, then start reviewing at the GotoState function.

State machines are plumbed a bit different in C#, the main difference being the state object is an abstract class with a fixed number of event handlers, which each state inheriting from that class implementing each handler (some perhaps throwing an exception). With javascript we don't need the abstract state class... Also, doing this serverside, you're going to need to be able to map from a state ID stored in your database to a state class.