asp.net AutoPostBack and update - c#

Is there a way to have autopostback enabled and not have page refresh (thereofre scrolling back to the top) when a dropdownlist changes for example?
I have a few dropdownlists and the values in the subsequent ones need to change based on what is picked in the upper ones.
Whats the best way to do that? Each DDL is populated from the DB.

Use an update panel to accomplish this. A full overview is provide here You add items to the panel that you need to post back and only that part of the page postbacks.

You could maintain scroll position between postbacks pretty easily
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.page.maintainscrollpositiononpostback.aspx

you can put all ddl into updatepanel,and then page will not postback itself.And your ddl can be rebind without needing a full page postback.
another option is to use cascading dropdown,there is a sample in asp.net ajax toolkit samples.It uses webservices for databinding.This methot is better than using updatapanels,but its little hard to implement.
http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/CascadingDropDown/CascadingDropDown.aspx ,check this example.

Us Jquery AJAX OR Simply Use ASP.net UpdatePanel Control

Related

Dealing with multiple "chained" postbacks from dynamically-created controls in a single page

I'm trying to build a very specific search page for a project and I'm having lot of trouble dealing with multiple postbacks invoked by dynamically-generated controls on a single page.
The page has to work like this:
There is a single checkbox, "Detailed search", that causes a postback on checking/unchecking.
When detailed search is not active, a simple grid with contents and buttons is displayed. Nothing special.
When detailed search is active, N checkboxes must be generated from some dynamic data, that represent the sections where you want the search to happen. Below the checkboxes, an AJAX-enabled tab control will appear, initially with no tab pages.
When checking one of the section checkboxes, a postback will occur. After the postback, data will be searched in the section selected by the user, then a new tab page containing a grid view of results and the name of the section will be added to the tab control. If the checkbox is unchecked, the tab page will disappear from the control, again, after a postback.
Now, the issue is that pretty much everything has to be generated dynamically, and that pretty much everything is connected to something else.
First issue: dealing with the "Detailed search" checkbox. Sounds easy, doesn't it? My initial idea was to set Page.Viewstate["DetailedSearchEnabled"] to true or false during the check/uncheck event handler, then create controls dynamically checking the value of DetailedSearchEnabled during Page_Load.
Nope. The postback event-handling happens between Page_Load and Page_LoadComplete. It would take an additional refresh for things to work as intended.
<< Then I'll just generate the controls on Page_LoadComplete! >>
Nope. Those controls need event handling as well, and if they're generated after Page_Load they will not be wired up correctly.
A possible solution would be generating everything in advance, on Page_Load, and only hiding/showing controls on Page_LoadComplete. But that is inefficient, and one important point of this search page is that only the minimum amount of controls should be generated.
The difficulty of this task seems to come from the way event wiring and the page life cycle work.
Surely there must be a better way of approaching this problem.
First issue: dealing with the "Detailed search" check box.
The correct approach (if you want to use page post-backs) is as follows:
In the CheckChanged event handler, save the value of the Checked property to ViewState["DetailedSearchEnabled"]. If the value is true, add the dynamic check boxes to the page. If the value is false, find and remove them.
Override LoadViewState. After calling base.LoadViewState, re-create the dynamic check boxes and wire up their events if ViewState["DetailedSearchEnabled"] is true. Note that neither Page_Load nor Page_LoadComplete is the appropriate place to do this.
Yes, you should create the dynamic check boxes at two points in the page life cycle. I recommend a helper method.
In general, your event handlers should add or remove just the dynamic controls (if any) affected by those particular events, but LoadViewState should re-create all dynamic controls that existed from the previous page request. You must store enough information in view state for LoadViewState to do so.
My answer to this other question demonstrates how to add and remove dynamic controls. You may want to use it as a reference.
Sounds to me like you should be using a CheckBoxList control to handle your dynamic checkboxes. You can add an remove items to the CheckBoxList during your post back and not have to worry about dynamically adding/removing actual controls/events to the form.
Here is a link to the msdn:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14atsyf5(v=vs.85).aspx
Here is some sample code:
Protected void Button1_Click (object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
CheckBoxList.Items.Add(new ListItem("TextValue1", "Value1"));
CheckBoxList.Items.Add(new ListItem("TextValue2", "Value2"));
}
If all else fails, you could still fall back on the quick-and-dirty old-fashioned ASP way.
Use Response.Write or <%...%> to generate your dynamic controls as plain old HTML (simple form fields, e.g. <input type="checkbox" name="foo" value="1" />).
Make sure you have a form field for every piece of information you may need after the postback(s). If necessary, use hidden form fields to 're-post' values across subsequent postbacks.
After postback, retrieve the values of the controls with the Request object.
Use those values to adjust the generation of controls as you see fit.
You should be able to do all of this in Page_Load. The advantage is total freedom. The disadvantage is total freedom to make a big mess of your aspx. So you may want to migrate all this dirty code out of your aspx, and into a custom-made control, which you can then add to your aspx.
When generating your own HTML, be careful not to introduce XSS vulnerabilities. Use HtmlEncode where necessary.
As you suggested yourself, there is a better way to tackle it.
If I was in the same situation, I would create web methods for interacting with the page, and use client side to do the UI. I'm currently working mostly with angular JS, although it does come with a learning curve. You could use ng-hide/ng-show to bind to the checkbox event to display the detailed search. When the n number of checkboxes needs to be displayed, you can then just fill them in with ng-repeat, for each of the items you need to display, after a check/uncheck you can dynamically populate new controls etc. through web method calls if extra data is needed.
Pure ASP postbacks are quite clunky from my experience, and not really suited for building a maintainable dynamic UI.
Instead of making so many postbacks, it would be better to use jquery and ajax calls to load the controls as needed and then attach events to it or you can even use UpdatePnael for that. Help Links:
https://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/asp.net/ajax-basics-with-jquery-in-asp.net/
http://encosia.com/using-jquery-to-directly-call-aspnet-ajax-page-methods/

Can a Gridview be populated even without using postback?

this is my second option regarding my first question I did a lot of searching in google and tried it for a couple of times. Do you think its possible to populate a gridview without any postback from a dropdownlist?
Use update panel and script manager. Change properties of update panel Update mod conditional. After you can call when you want "updatepanel.Update()" or select your trigers and it ll do it automaticly.
No. You need postback in some form traditionally or using AJAX. These kinds of things happen in the server and that is why you need postback. Or you can use extensive Javascript.
You can use JavaScript and draw the whole gridview since a gridview is a table with columns and rows.

How can I access the value of a checkbox without a postback?

I have a radgrid controlling access to an application for users. There are two columns, a 'name' column and a checkbox 'access' column representing their current access permission. the checkboxes are populated from a database. I would like the to change the checkboxes to grant or deny access to the users I specify. Since there are alot of users I would like to make multiple changes and use a submit button to write the changes to the database. I do not want to postback with each checkbox change and wait for the page to "blink". My problem is that with the checkbox postback disabled, when I click submit, the value of the checkboxes are not registering the changes I make. I need a way to access the current client-side state of the checkbox or some workaround to accomplish this.
Thanks in advance!
You could use javascript to send an ajax request that saves the change to the database without reloading the page. Then your updates happen right away and there's no "blink".
Thank you for the support. It turns out that the issue wasnt with client/server-side visibility, but with the page lifecycle. I was refreshing the radgrid in the PageLoad method and checking the value of the checkboxes in the Submit method. I didn't realize PageLoad was executed prior to Submit, thus clearing my selections. By removing the RadGrid refresh from PageLoad, the current values of the checkboxs were preserved.
If you set AutoPostBack to false, that will disable the postback, but they should still be posting their current values.
Sounds to me more like an issue with the dynamic generation of the checkboxes.
Not sure why you are not able to access the values of checkbox at server side, but to answer your question "I need a way to access the current client-side state of the checkbox or some workaround to accomplish this"...
You can use server tags and read the values of checkboxes at client side.
For more information about server tags, read this MSDN link.

C# ASP.NET Collapsible Gridview

Is there a way to create a collapsible ASP.NET gridview displaying a parent child relationship based on a check box click?
An easy solution would be to wrap your GridView in an UpdatePanel, and just code everything as you would with normal postbacks. But this is a very heavy-handed approach.
Another option is to use Microsoft's AJAX Library to invoke PageMethods. See the second example here: http://www.asp.net/ajax/documentation/live/Tutorials/ExposingWebServicesToAJAXTutorial.aspx . Once the page loads, you can bind a function to the checkboxes' click events that invokes a PageMethod to inject the appropriate HTML labels and inputs into the row, with a link that passes the values from the form to a different PageMethod.
I don't think that any of the Microsoft grids can do that. However, third party grids will do this. We used ComponentArt's grid control on my last project, and used it to do exactly what you want.

ASP.Net Form Databound problems

I know there is a similar problem on this forum, but the solutions did not really work for me. I am populating form controls with fields from a few different data sources, and the data shows up great.
I have an ImageButton control, which has an OnClick Event set to grab all of the data from the form. Unfortunately, when I click the button, it seems as though the page is reloading first, and THEN is executes the OnClick call. The data that was hand-entered, or hard-coded seems to be pulled fine from the controls it was entered in, but anything that was pulled from a datasource is not able to be read. Any ideas. this is the last hurdle in a project that I have been working on for 6 months.
Are you talking about drop downs or gridviews? When are you binding data, on page load?
Good design will have you bind your data upon page load but only in
if(!isPostBack){
dropdown.databind()
gridview.databind()
}.
Otherwise it will rebind every page load. If its not reloading you can get selected values from those controls if thats what your looking for.
An alternative is to set your data source and databind in your aspx page with a datasource object. That automates the above automatically.
Have you enabled viewstate on your controls? Posting code samples would go a long way to helping solve your issue.
When you click on a bottom in asp.net at first all the page Events take place like Page_Load and ... and then the event happens ( in this case Click).
But because everything is loading again, I think that you have a !isPostback in your code that you use to bind the data, you should remove that in order to get your data every time.
Or if it is not the solution please post some code and more description for the problem
Actually, it is hiddenfields, dropdowns, labels, and textfields. I just tried doing the binding in the init, and the load, but no dice. When I tried binding it on !isPostBack only, none of the fields showed up.
I think one of the main problems is that the dataset I am getting is from a method call to an API. I receive the data fine, but it comes in programmatically, then I have to do all of the control-setting programmatically as well. Would you like to see the code for ideas? Thank you for helping, no one is working today!
Jason

Categories