Binding using data-win-bind to backgroundImageUrl - data-binding

I'm trying to bind the background-img: url('') property in a WinJS application.
I've got a view model property which is set to something dynamic like:
'images/' + myObject.name + '.jpg'
But I'm unsure how to use data-win-bind to set said property to the css property background-img: url(''); correctly.
My template is currently set like this:
<div class="item" data-win-bind="style.backgroundImage: backgroundImageUrl">
Where backgroundImageUrl is my view model property, but this does not seem to setting things correctly.
Any ideas as to how to bind to these properties?

Your data-win-bind syntax looks correct. So there could be two possibilities.
First, make sure you've called WinJS.Binding.processAll. That's necessary to set the binding context and set up the bindings described by data-win-bind attributes. Nothing happens without it.
Second, the value of the source's backgroundImageUrl must be a string in the form that CSS expects, that is, "url('')". It can't just be the relative path itself, like you would use with an img.src target.
To do this, either make the source's property in that form, or use a binding initializer/converter to add the url('') part automatically. For more on that, I suggest looking at Chapter 6 of my free ebook, Programming Windows Store Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, 2nd Edition, with the general data-binding discussion starting on page 299 and the initializer stuff starting on page 315.

Related

Data-Link to CSS background-image using a helper function not render

I have a template which renders a background image to CSS within a <div> like this
style="background-image: url({{>~facilityImagePathDisplay(#data)}})"
Visual Studio doesn't like this and it's not a big deal but I wanted to see if there was a proper way to do this. I read through the documentation. Other stack questions and the below was created based off of the docs. This specifically links to all the docs Logic in JsViews css-tag
<div class="tile-image" data-link="css-background-image{:~facilityImagePathDisplay(#data)}" >
The above statement outputs exactly this to the div. <div class="tile-image" data-link="css-background-image{:~facilityImagePathDisplay(#data)}"> so it looks like it's not firing the helper function and rendering anything at all. Am I missing something?
It depends if you are running the link() method of JsViews, or simply the render() method of JsRender.
Your first version will works in both cases, but is simply rendering the CSS style.
The second version would only be used if you are running the link() method of JsViews - for data-binding etc. (So the background image could be dynamically updated if you data-binding triggers a new value).
For the data-link version, you need to makes sure the helper is returning a string that is not just "someUrl", but "url(someUrl)" - to provide the correct CSS data url syntax. In that case, the following should work:
data-link="css-background-image{:~facilityImagePathDisplay(#data)}"
Alternatively you can have the helper return just the "someUrl" string, but then include the "url(" and ")" strings in the template:
data-link="css-background-image{:'url(' + ~facilityImagePathDisplay(#data) + ')'}"

setting Style property of a WebControl From Code Behind

recently I found in one of my older projects (asp.net 4.0)
that I've been using this code
to set display Style-property To none
DDL_ChosenEmpl.Attributes.Add("style", "display:none");
lately I was using
DDL_ChosenEmpl.Style.Add("display", "none");
i would like to know
in any case such as - property already exist whether it's with different value or not , will any of them should be avoided ?
what are the main differences between both methods ?
Both does the same functionality as you have done. The thing is, in "Attributes" collection, you have a control's other attributes like "click", "dblclick", etc. You can use either way. I believe Microsoft has given the later part for user's convinience to make coding easy.

Is it bad to add a css class that doesn't exist?

I want to add a bunch of classes to some text fields so i can get their values with jquery. This seems like standard practice when using jQuery and this post suggests it as the answer but how does this affect page loading? Won't it be trying to find all these classes? I have been told in the past to try minimise the amount of classes used on controls.
I have about 12 controls i'll want to add unique classes to to get their value. I am using asp.net so I can't use the id. I also can't use the ClientID as the controls are in a table (but only 1 set of controls will show at any one time).
e.g.
<asp:TextBox ID="txtValue1" runat="server" CssClass="value1" Text='value1' />
<asp:TextBox ID="txtValue2" runat="server" CssClass="value2" Text='value2' />
<asp:TextBox ID="txtValue3" runat="server" CssClass="value3" Text='value3' />
...
var value1 = $('.value1').val();
var value2 = $('.value2').val();
var value3 = $('.value3').val();
And none of the class names will exist in css.
Thanks
Edit:
I know this works but I was more curious about the affect it had on page loading. There was an answer (seems to be deleted now) that said something like the html parser ignores the classes. The css parser will only look at classes that are defined. So it sounds like it would be completely ignored and have no affect on page load. Is this right?
It is okay to use a CSS class that doesn't exist, but if they are unique you want to use id, not class.
You say you are using ASP.Net so you can't use the ID parameter, but you can. In JQuery you can get the controls using the below
var value1 = $('[ID$=yourID]').val();
For more info on JQuery Selectors check out: JQuery Selectors and Attribute Ends With Selector
The above selector basically finds the id ENDING in "yourID" so ignoring all the masterpages extra text at the start. You just have to make sure these are unique. e.g. don't have ids like "HSBC" and "SBC" as the above selector on "SBC" will find both.
I don't think it's a problem. The only times I've had problems with non-existant classes or ID's is one time I had an onclick reference an ID that didn't exist. This messed things up...Other than that I think classes are pretty harmless. I'd be interested to know though..
Any other thoughts??
Which version of asp.net are you using? In asp.net 4.0, you have the ability to use unmangled ids. It looks like the simplest solution would be to set ClientIDMode="Static" to all of your textboxes and then refer by id. Otherwise, sure, I've created classes that don't exist to refer to things.... all the time.
Edit: (in response to your comment about the effect page load).
I think your question about having extra classes in a div that are not currently used is not a bad question (at least in a theoretical sense), and I honestly don't know the precise answer. I do believe any effect is quite minuscule. If you consider best practices to write html, you generally write and structure the HTML, with it's classes, before you write the CSS. This means at the time you write the CSS, certainly some classes will not be used. Indeed, after styling the basic tags (body, h1, a, etc), you may find you never need to create selectors with those classes for some particular design. And yet for the next design, you might need those classes. I'm pretty sure the technology behind CSS was built with those kinds of scenarios in mind, and I bet millions if not billions of pages on the internet follow that exact scenario, especially if they use something like Modernizr, which adds classes to the html element of the page as a way of providing you classes you can select against considering the possible capabilities of the current browser. You may never need those classes, but they are there if you need them.

WPF-like properties with custom controls in ASP.net

In WPF it's possible to set a property of a custom control by either an attribute or by an inner property. Like this:
<custom:UserControl1 Text="My text here..."></custom:UserControl1>
Equals:
<custom:UserControl1>
<custom:UserControl1.Text>
My text here...
</custom:UserControl1.Text>
</custom:UserControl1>
In ASP.net the type of custom control property can be defined by the PersistenceMode attribute. At the moment I can only find a way to define a property either as an attribute or as an inner property.
Is there a possible way to set the custom control property like WPF on either way?
Thanks!
For Text, setting:
[
PersistenceMode(PersistenceMode.InnerProperty),
DesignerSerializationVisibility(DesignerSerializationVisibility.Content)
]
public string Text
For the property you want to appear that way will allow you do to the second option; however, alternatively, you probably also could specify it inline. If that's the only property that you use as a child element, you can also specify PersistenceMode.InnerDefaultProperty or EncodedInnerDefaultProperty (as it would be the default), that latter of which would encode it.
Realistically, you can't do everything like you can in WPF in ASP.NET; it's just not that fully supported in the designer as that wasn't it's intent. But primitive types you can define as an inner property with a content design serialization, and it should allow you to do both options.
HTH.

How can I use a traditional HTML id attribute with an ASP.net runat='server' tag?

I am refactoring some CSS on a website. I have been working on, and noticed the absence of traditional HTML IDs in the code.
There is heavy use of CssClass='…', or sometimes just class='…', but I can't seem to find a way to say id='…' and not have it swapped out by the server.
Here is an example:
<span id='position_title' runat='server'>Manager</span>
When the response comes back from the server, I get:
<span id='$aspnet$crap$here$position_title'>Manager</span>
Any help here?
Use jQuery to select the element:
$("span[id$='position_title']")....
jQuery's flexible selectors, especially its 'begins with'/'ends with selectors' (the 'end with' selector is shown above, provide a great way around ASP.NET's dom id munge.
rp
The 'crap' placed in front of the id is related to the container(s) of the control and there is no way (as far as I know) to prevent this behavior, other than not putting it in any container.
If you need to refer to the id in script, you can use the ClientID of the control, like so:
<script type="text/javascript">
var theSpan = document.getElementById('<%= position_title.ClientID %>');
</script>
Most of the fixes suggested her are overkill for a very simple problem. Just have separate divs and spans that you target with CSS. Don't target the ASP.NET controls directly if you want to use IDs.
<span id="FooContainer">
<span runat="server" id="Foo" >
......
<span>
</span>
You can embed your CSS within the page, sprinkled with some server tags to overcome the problem. At runtime the code blocks will be replaced with the ASP.NET generated IDs.
For example:
[style type="text/css"]
#<%= AspNetId.ClientID %> {
... styles go here...
}
[/style]
[script type="text/javascript"]
document.getElementById("<%= AspNetId.ClientID %>");
[/script]
You could go a bit further and have some code files that generate CSS too, if you wanted to have your CSS contained within a separate file.
Also, I may be jumping the gun a bit here, but you could use the ASP.NET MVC stuff (not yet officially released as of this writing) which gets away from the Web Forms and gives you total control over the markup generated.
Ok, I guess the jury is out on this one.
#leddt, I already knew that the 'crap' was the containers surrounding it, but I thought maybe Microsoft would have left a backdoor to leave the ID alone. Regenerating CSS files on every use by including ClientIDs would be a horrible idea.
I'm either left with using classes everywhere, or some garbled looking IDs hardcoded in the css.
#Matt Dawdy: There are some great uses for IDs in CSS, primarily when you want to style an element that you know only appears once in either the website or a page, such as a logout button or masthead.
The best thing to do here is give it a unique class name.
You're likely going to have to remove the runat="server" from the span and then place a within the span so you can stylize the span and still have the dynamic internal content.
Not an elegant or easy solution (and it requires a recompile), but it works.
.Net will always replace your id values with some mangled (every so slightly predictable, but still don't count on it) value. Do you really NEED to have that id runat=server? If you don't put in runat=server, then it won't mangle it...
ADDED:
Like leddt said, you can reference the span (or any runat=server with an id) by using ClientID, but I don't think that works in CSS.
But I think that you have a larger problem if your CSS is using ID based selectors. You can't re-use an ID. You can't have multiple items on the same page with the same ID. .Net will complain about that.
So, with that in mind, is your job of refactoring the CSS getting to be a bit larger in scope?
I don't know of a way to stop .NET from mangling the ID, but I can think of a couple ways to work around it:
1 - Nest spans, one with runat="server", one without:
<style type="text/css">
#position_title { // Whatever
}
<span id="position_titleserver" runat="server"><span id="position_title">Manager</span></span>
2 - As Joel Coehoorn suggested, use a unique class name instead. Already using the class for something? Doesn't matter, you can use more than 1! This...
<style type="text/css">
.position_title { font-weight: bold; }
.foo { color: red; }
.bar { font-style: italic; }
</style>
<span id="thiswillbemangled" class="foo bar position_title" runat="server">Manager</span>
...will display this:
Manager
3 - Write a Javascript function to fix the IDs after the page loads
function fixIds()
{
var tagList = document.getElementsByTagName("*");
for(var i=0;i<tagList.length;i++)
{
if(tagList[i].id)
{
if(tagList[i].id.indexOf('$') > -1)
{
var tempArray = tagList[i].id.split("$");
tagList[i].id = tempArray[tempArray.length - 1];
}
}
}
}
If you're fearing classitus, try using an id on a parent or child selector that contains the element that you wish to style. This parent element should NOT have the runat server applied. Simply put, it's a good idea to plan your structural containers to not run code behind (ie. no runat), that way you can access major portions of your application/site using non-altered IDs. If it's too late to do so, add a wrapper div/span or use the class solution as mentioned.
Is there a particular reason that you want the controls to be runat="server"?
If so, I second the use of < asp : Literal > . . .
It should do the job for you as you will still be able to edit the data in code behind.
I usually make my own control that extends WebControl or HtmlGenericControl, and I override ClientID - returning the ID property instead of the generated ClientID. This will cause any transformation that .NET does to the ClientID because of naming containers to be reverted back to the original id that you specified in tag markup. This is great if you are using client side libraries like jQuery and need predictable unique ids, but tough if you rely on viewstate for anything server-side.
If you are accessing the span or whatever tag is giving you problems from the C# or VB code behind, then the runat="server" has to remain and you should use instead <span class="some_class" id="someID">. If you are not accessing the tag in the code behind, then remove the runat="server".

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