I have a web part that needs to examine every other web part on a given page for info. I've tried two approaches, but neither seems to be the answer I'm looking for.

First, I tried getting a reference to Parent (which returns the WebPartManager) and enumerating through it's Controls (or WebParts) collection. This almost works - it gives me every web part in the same WebPartZone as my web part. But it doesn't give me all the web parts in the other zones. Example:

            WebPartManager wpm = (WebPartManager)this.Parent;
            foreach (WebPart wp in wpm.WebParts)
            {
                Debug.WriteLine("I found " + wp.Title);
            }

After some thinking I decided to try and enumerate through the Zones as well, but that yielded the same results. It only gives me the Zone I'm in for some reason. I don't understand why.

            WebPartManager wpm = (WebPartManager)Parent;
            foreach (WebPartZone wpz in wpm.Zones)
            {
                Debug.WriteLine("In Zone " + wpz.ID);
                foreach (WebPart wp in wpz.WebParts)
                {
                    Debug.WriteLine("I found " + wp.Title);
                }
            }

My second thought was to simply grab all the controls on the Page, and loop through them looking for web parts. There are two problems with this. First, we use a Site.Master as well as web parts, so the only control in the Page.Controls collection is Site.Master. Second, I want my web part to function in any given web page, so I don't want to hard-code something to work around my particular layout. So enumerating the Page controls is out.

Can anyone clue me in as to how I can enumerate all Web Parts in all zones - from a web part?

You can get a reference to the collection of webparts on the page be accessing WebParts property of the WebPartManager:

 WebPartCollection parts = WebPartManager1.WebParts;

But look at the first line of both my examples - that's exactly what I'm doing.

The thing is, this works fine if I access the WebPartManager from the Page's code-behind. It returns all the web parts.

But I need to reference the WebPartManager from the Webpart. When you access the Parent of a web part, it returns a reference to the WebPartManager it resides in. But for some reason, the WPM only seems to recognize the zone from the calling web part. Try it, you'll see. Something like this:

public MyClass : WebPart

{

public void SomeFunction()

{

}

}

Oops, sorry about that. I should have read your post more carefully. Try this:

        WebPartManager wpm = WebPartManager.GetCurrentWebPartManager(this.Page);
        foreach (WebPart wp in wpm.WebParts)
        {
            System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("Found {0}", wp.Title);
        }