CSS Dropping For Certain Controls - asp.net

We have a pretty complex application design with a bunch of telerik controls. Every now and then, we get issues where the associated CSS to a file are lost, and the controls are not styled. So for instance, after an async postback (a couple of postbacks into the life of the page), the CSS for the textbox, date picker, combo, and other controls are lost. It's not complete; some controls still appear as they normally do, I don't think it's all inclusive.
Any idea why and how I can debug, and determine why they get lost? Anything I can do to work around it?
Thanks.
Brian

Have you tried the RadStyleSheetManager?

RadStyleSheetManager can help, but statically defining the CSS is the solution to this weird problem. RadStylesheetManager also gets references to the control dynamically and would have the same problem.

Related

Get value form elements inside div with only ASP.NET

I'm newbie in ASP.NET and i think that my question is quite simple, but I'm not getting success in my searches through google or even stackoverflow.
I have a asp.net method (vb.net) that loads a entire html page inside a div.
Doing searches, i discovered that it can be like this:
On .aspx page:
<div id="content"></div>
On .vb codebehind:
Private sub LoadContent()
content.InnerHtml = MyDLL.LoadFromDatabase.Value.ToString()
End Sub
So, nothing special until here.
But, if consider that the html code loaded from database has form elements like <input id="name" type="text">, my problem starts...
On page postback these don't keep the values as <asp:TextBox> created natively on code, does.
And the other thing that I want is a way to retrieve the value from them to work on codebehind, like: myvar = content.Controls("name").Value
At least, is there a way to solve my problem?
Sorry for my bad english, and thanks so much.
CRice is right. If you want the viewstate to persist through postback you need to create the controls server-side.
Careful though: I've had bad experience with dynamically created controls on Asp.Net, specifically when trying to bind events to them. Not only would you have to use delegates and events (a hard topic for a newbie), also when I tried it a few years ago I just couldn't get it to work, no matter what.
If you're going for dynamic created controls, make sure it's worth the effort, because it WILL be an effort, now and in the future when you would like to maintain and add expand. A rule of thumb is that dynamic mechanisms are always harder to maintain than static ones, but they provide more flexibility.
Having that said, if you're still going for dynamic html loading, be aware that better solutions exist, though they require different architectures: client side frameworks (best is angluar.js) provide dynamic loading of "modules" (and much more), which is what you want. On the server side, asp.net MVC with its Razor view engine, partial views etc., is better suited for dynamic html generation.
Back to your original question,are you sure you need a full postback? What about a nice neat Ajax call to a web service? Can get the job done in many cases without reloading the whole page. I guess using jquery's $.ajax syntax and creating a simple .asmx web service will be easiest for you.
Last but not least, why use vb.net instead of c#? It sucks man. Give it up while you still can.

ASP.NET dynamic controls data exchange in postback

Please excuse me for a probably low quality of this question, since I'm not a web dev, so I possibly don't now some obvious things and don't know what to Google for. I think problem must have some simple solution, but I'm struggling with it for two days now, so I feel myself pretty stupid :-).
I have a custom control which is a set of checkboxes which are added dynamically based on a property which is set in OnLoad event of a page. I have two such controls on a page and second control items should be based on items selected in first control.
The problem is, I can't figure out, how to catch on autopostback which boxes were selected in first control before second contol is constructed to pass this data to it?
Take a look at this.
http://forums.asp.net/t/1440174.aspx
Since your building them dynamically, they are not as easy to find as webforms would like to be, if you added them to the page and wired up events and such.
Your going to look at the Request.Forms list, and search thru it for any controls you want.
I believe checkboxes are like radio buttons, they only return if they are checked, which is good, cause you want to know which ones were checked.
I've used same solution as in the accepted answer for this question: Dynamically Change User Control in ASP.Net , just need to assign an unique id for each dynamically created CheckBox in custom control. Not as clean solution as I want but at least it works.
You can save the data in the ViewState, QueryString or as Session before moving to the next page and you can do modifications based on it.

Preventing page lifecycle for one control

I'm using a file manager-type WebControl that does lots of postbacks. It's placed inside a Page that is relatively complex. I would like to prevent the WebControl from causing the whole Page to go through the lifecycle. An UpdatePanel helps a little, but not enough.
Is there any way to isolate the WebControl from the rest of the Page? The only way I can think of is sticking the WebControl in a separate Page and creating an iframe in the original Page. Unfortunately that also means my WebControl properties/settings are no longer in the original Page. If I want two instances of the WebControl with different settings, then I have to create a Page for each setting and reference the correct one in my iframes. Not quite as "drag & drop" as I would like. Any other suggestions?
Hard to tell, you can't prevent a control from going through lifecycle; is there anyway to identify though, that during a certain page postback, you prevent the code from running in each event handler by doing something like:
if (_shouldNotRun == true)
return;
//Event handler code
Essentially, figuring out some way to indicate whether the control should run may be an option. IFrame would work, but yes you have to deal with the issues you mentioned. Can you give more detals to the problem?
HTH.
Not 100% sure what events possible to override that are called on PostBack. A good source for the Life Cycle of a page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178472.aspx)
But it sounds as it would be better to remake your control to create Ajax webservice requests for the functions that are possible to prevent most of the postback's?
Cheers,
Stefan

Best way to simulate 'SelectedIndexChanged' for ASP.NET DropDownList control with ViewState disabled

I've found many posts where people try to work around the problem of SelectedIndexChanged not working when EnableViewState='false'.
Im a little confused why control state doesnt kick in and allow it to work, but thats bonus points if anyone can explain that too.
Some of the 'hacks' are pretty 'hacky'. Like setting a value on the viewstate of the page itself corresponding to the dropdown value and then comparing that value with the one that is received durin the postback.
I'm lookin for the best most elegant solution (if there is a good one).
I dont know if this would be a clever derived control or something cleverer, but I want to make sure the solution is generic enough to be 'trustable' and not just a hack that only works for the specific page in question (which is common for such hacks!).
If you really want to know why and how this works, I'd suggest the following article:
TRULY Understanding ViewState
It's not an easy read, but does cover all the problems that people commonly encounter with viewstate. And it covers why everything works if you populate in Page_Init as opposed to Page_Load.
Bind the list before adding it to the control collection (not after as above commenter says).
-author of said article :)
Try loading your data into the DropDownList at an earlier point. Ie. in InitComplete. I haven't tested it, but I think that should do the trick.
EDIT:
It didn't do the trick. I've tested it, and it doesn't work satisfactory. As Ken Browning noted in another answer on this question, the SelectedIndexChanged event is ALWAYS fired if the SelectedIndex is any other than its initial value.
Why isn't SelectedIndex stored in ControlState instead of in ViewState. Can we trick ViewState to only keep track of SelectedIndex, while not storing the Items collection?

ASP.NET Custom Controls and "Dynamic" Event Model

OK, I am not sure if the title it completely accurate, open to suggestions!
I am in the process of creating an ASP.NET custom control, this is something that is still relatively new to me, so please bear with me.
I am thinking about the event model. Since we are not using Web Controls there are no events being fired from buttons, rather I am manually calling __doPostBack with the appropriate arguments. However this can obviously mean that there are a lot of postbacks occuring when say, selecting options (which render differently when selected).
In time, I will need to make this more Ajax-y and responsive, so I will need to change the event binding to call local Javascript.
So, I was thinking I should be able to toggle the "mode" of the control, it can either use postback and handlle itself, or you can specify the Javascript function names to call instead of the doPostBack.
What are your thoughts on this?
Am I approaching the raising of the events from the control in the wrong way? (totally open to suggestions here!)
How would you approach a similar problem?
Edit - To Clarify
I am creating a custom rendered control (i.e. inherits from WebControl).
We are not using existnig Web Controls since we want complete control over the rendered output.
AFAIK the only way to get a server side event to occur from a custom rendered control is to call doPostBack from the rendered elements (please correct if wrong!).
ASP.NET MVC is not an option.
Very odd. You're using ASP.NET server controls and custom controls, but you're not using web controls? And you're calling __doPostBack manually?
Do you like to do things the hard way?
If I was still using the server control model rather than MVC, I would slap ASP.NET Ajax controls on that sucker and call it a day. What you're doing is like putting a blower on a model T. It may be fun and interesting, but after you're done with all the hard work, what do you really have?
I have been doing some more digging on this, and came across how to inject Javascript in to the client when required. This will obviously play a huge part in making the controls more responsive and less round-trips to the server.
For example: RegisterClientScriptBlock.
Look forward to playing with this more, feel free to get invovled people!

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