How to display Dynamic Content without Property control

Recently I was investigating EPiServer's Dynamic Content a bit. General impression is very positive, Dynamic Content is a great feature. From developer's point of view it's fairly easy to develop custom Dynamic Content, everything works like charm .... maybe beside one thing :)

Unfortunately, to display property's value with dynamic content replaced with our controls it's required to use EPiServer's control:

   1:  <EPiServer:Property PropertyName="MainBody" runat="server" />

Different approaches won't work.

   1:  <%= CurrentPage["MainBody"] %>

   2:  <%= CurrentPage.Property["MainBody"] %>

   3:  litMainBody.Text = CurrentPage.Property["MainBody"].ToWebString()

It is a considerable drawback as there are cases in which it's required to do something with property's value before displaying it:

• For example you may want to alter all links by adding some extra parameters
• When using Model-View-Presenter (flavor of MVC) you want to pass only pure data to the view.
  

It was worth spending some time to find a workaround. In the end, solution turned out to be not so convoluted, here is a control which takes a string and displays it replacing any dynamic content with corresponding controls.

   1:  public partial class DynamicContent : UserControlBase

   2:  {

   3:      public string StringToDisplay

   4:      {

   5:          set

   6:          {

   7:              var propertyControl = new PropertyLongStringControl

   8:                                        {

   9:                                            Page = Page,

  10:                                            PropertyData = new PropertyXhtmlString(value)

  11:                                        };

  12:              Controls.Add(propertyControl);

  13:          }

  14:      }

  15:  }

And the usage is really straightforward:

   1:  <unit:DynamicContent runat="server" id="dcMainBody" />

   2:  

   3:  dcMainBody.StringToDisplay = CurrentPage.Property["MainBody"].ToWebString();

Before calling dcMainBody.StringToDisplay you can of course change property's value in any arbitrary way.

Hope it will save someone a bit of time :)