A requirement of a current portal project is for a User to click an "Add Content" link on a Page and have a pop-up form offer him a Catalog of available WebParts (I tried to point out, to no avail, that the Catalog could be nicely placed at the top of the Page and shown/hidden easily but ...)

Anyhooo ... my new plan is to retrieve a list of available Zones from the WebPartManager and Parts from the various CatalogParts, place them in javascript variables and eventually pass them to the pop-up form to be cobbled into a checkbox group of Parts and a dropdown of available zones ...

I am able to get the Zones from the WebPartManager as early as Page_Init. I can retrieve the collection of CatalogParts from my CatalogZone. But when I attempt to iterate through each CatalogPart, calling GetAvailableWebPartDescriptions, I am running into a problem.

This CatalogPart is one I built that iterates through a specific directory looking for .WebPart files then using WebPartManager.ImportWebPart. This works great after the Page has been loaded and I click a button to Add Content and change the DisplayMode to CatalogDisplayMode.

However, at this point (Page_Init, first time through) in the lifetime of the Page, the WebPartManager property of the CatalogPart is coming back null, even if I set DisplayMode to CatalogDisplayMode.

When does a CatalogPart actually get a reference to its WebPartmanager?

Thanks!

Update:

I tried creating a WebPartManager object, setting it's DisplayMode to Catalog and calling it's ImportWebPart method and I get the following exception:

The specified display mode is not supported on this page. Make sure personalization is enabled and the corresponding zones are present on the page. The display mode can be set during and after Page_Init [I have done this].
Parameter name: value

To answer your first question, currently the CatalogPart gets a reference to its CatalogZoneBase and WebPartManager in CatalogZoneBase.CreateChildControls(). The CatalogZoneBase.CatalogParts property getter calls EnsureChildControls(). So, the reference to the CatalogZoneBase and WebPartManager should be called the first time the CatalogZoneBase Controls property or CatalogParts property is accessed.

For your second question, to set the DisplayMode to Catalog the following conditions must be true: Personalization is enabled, an authenticated user is browsing the page, and the page must contain a CatalogZoneBase. Are all of these true? If so, please post a repro.

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