jQuery autocomplete in ASP.NET webforms? - asp.net

Has anyone used jQuery to populate an autocomplete list on a textbox using ASP.NET webforms? If so, can anyone recommend a good method? From my reading so far, it seems like most people are using delimited lists rather than JSON to bring the items back. I'm open to any ideas that will get me up and running rather quickly.

I made a tutorial to do this with asp.net mvc but it should be almost identical for traditional webforms:
http://blogs.msdn.com/joecar/archive/2009/01/08/autocomplete-with-asp-net-mvc-and-jquery.aspx

There are many, many examples on the web. I've used this one before, and if I recall you only need to create an aspx that will return matching terms as a <BR/> separated list:
http://www.dyve.net/jquery/?autocomplete
The documentation shows php in the example, but there's no difference in the way the plugin itself works and I didn't have to do anything special as a result.
From the documentation:
> $("#input_box").autocomplete("my_autocomplete_backend.php");
In the above example, Autocomplete
expects an input element with the id
"input_box" to exist. When a user
starts typing in the input box, the
autocompleter will request
my_autocomplete_backend.php with a GET
parameter named q that contains the
current value of the input box. Let's
assume that the user has typed
"foo"(without quotes). Autocomplete
will then request
my_autocomplete_backend.php?q=foo.
The backend should output possible
values for the autocompleter, each on
a single line. Output cannot contain
the pipe symbol "|", since that is
considered a separator (more on that
later).
An appropiate simple output would be:
foo
fool
foot
footloose
foo fighters
food fight

I wrote an Asp.Net WebControl and some Asp.Net MVC extension methods wrapping the JQuery UI autocomplete widget.
I wrote documentation as well about how to implement a working resource providing a JSon result.
You can find it at:
http://autocompletedotnet.codeplex.com/
Hope it can help

Related

Does Kentico allow query strings with question mark?

I'm trying to migrate my ASPX site to Kentico, and as part of my task I'm migrating URLs. I need to preserve my URL structure, so I need to keep URLs which look like : "foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=1".
I checked page's "URLs" property tried to use wildcards, some patterns like /bar/{pageid}- /bar/{?pageid?}-, etc but Kentico always replaces question marks.
Is there a way to achieve that via the admin interface?
You don't need to do anything in order to use "foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=1" url.
Create a page under the root and call it bar, so you'll get a page # foo.com/bar.aspx. Kentico and/or .net does not care what you add to a url after question mark, so foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=1 will work as well as foo.com/bar.aspx?someparam=sdf, or foo.com/bar.aspx?id=1&p=3&t=3.
You may (or may not) implement some functionality based on query string (e.g. paging), so it will parse query string and act in appropriate way.
By default Kentico UI does not handle adding URL aliases with URL parameters like you show. There is an article on the DevNet for a URL Redirection module which has code you can import into your site to allow you to perform these redirects within the Kentico UI. I'd suggest using this approach.
Unfortunately, I can't share a code sample since it's an article but it also has a link to download the code too. This appears to only be coded for Kentico 8.2 right now but I'm guessing you could do some work to make it work for other versions if you needed.
I think there are few concepts that you are clubbing here. I will start with your line code here
/bar/{pageid} - {pageid} is a positional parameter in Kentico's language if you choose to use dynamic URLS based on patterns. SO if you have a code that relies on pageid parameter to fetch some data then Kentico will pass that value. E.g in case of /bar/420, it will pass pageid as 420 different web parts on your template
/bar/{?pageid?} - This will search for query string parameter "pageid" on the request URL and replace its value here. So if you passed foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=366, the resulting URL will be /bar/366
The #1 is positional parameter and #2 is the way in which Kentico resolves query string macros.
I hope this clarifies.

Pass value WinForm =>(page.html?query123)=> HTML =>(page.aspx?query123)=> asp.net //esle?

The problem here is the middle of the line (HTML).
The chain:
I have WinForm program that uses awesomium (alternative to native webBrowser) to view Html page that has a part of asp.net page in it's iframe.
The problem:
The problem is that I need to pass value to asp.net page, it is easily achieved without middle of the chain (Html iframe) by sending hashed and crypted querystring.
How it works:
WinForm do some thing, then use few-step-crypt to code all the needed values into 1 string.
Then it should send this string to asp.net page through the iframe (and that's the problem, it is easy to receive query string in asp.net page, but firstly I need to receive it in Html and send to asp.net).
Acceptable answers:
1) Probably the most easily one - using JavaScript. I have heard it is possible to be done in that way.
How I imagine this - I send query string from WinForm to Html page as http:\\HtmlPage.html?AspNet.aspx?CryptedString
Then Html receive it with JavaScript and put querystring "AspNet.aspx?CryptedString" into iframe's "src=http:\\" resulting in "src=http:\\AspNet.aspx?CryptedString"
And then I easily get it in asp.net page.
2) Somehow create >>>VIRTUAL<<<(NOTE: Virtual, I don't want querystring to be saved on the HDD, even don't suggest) asp.net or html page with iframe source taken directly from WinForm string.
Probably that is possible with awesomium, but I'm new to it and don't know how to (if it is possible ofc).
3) Some web service with which I can communicate between asp.net and WinForm through the existing HTML iframe.
4) Another way that replace one of 3 previous, that doesn't save "values" in querystring/else on HDD nor is visible for the user, doesn't use asp.net page's server to create iframe-page on it. On HTML page's server HTML is only allowed, PhP isn't.
5) If you don't know any of 4 above - suggest free PhP hosting without ads (if such exists, what I highly doubt).
Priority:
The best one would be #3, then #2, then #1, then #5 (#4 is excluded as it is unknown).
And in the end:
Thanks in advance for your help.
P.S.Currently at work, so I'll check/try all answers later on and will report tomorrow if any suits my needs. Thanks again.
Answering my own question. I have found 2 ways that can do what I did want.
The first one:
Creating a RAM file System.IO.MemoryStream or another method (google c# create a file in ram).
The second one:
Creating a hidden+encrypted+system+custom-readable-only-by-program-crypt file somewhere in the far away folder via File.SetAttributes Method and System.IO.StreamWriter/Reader or System.IO.FileStream or System.IO.TextWriter, etc. depending on what it should be.
Once this file was used for needs delete it + delete on exit + delete on start using
if (File.Exists(path)
{
File.Delete(path);
}
(Need more reputation to post few links -_-, and I don't want to post only part of them, either all or no at all, so use google if you'll need anything from here).
If you'll need to store "Small temp file" and not for a long time use first one, if "Heavy" use second one, unless you badly need to use RAM for it.

Retrieve data from a website via Visual Basic

There is this website that we purchase widgets from that provides details for each of their parts on its own webpage. Example: http://www.digikey.ca/product-search/en?lang=en&site=ca&KeyWords=AE9912-ND. I have to find all of their parts that are in our database, and add Manufacturer and Manufacturer Part Number values to their fields.
I was told that there is a way for Visual Basic to access a webpage and extract information. If someone could point me in the right direction on where to start, I'm sure I can figure this out.
Thanks.
How to scrape a website using HTMLAgilityPack (VB.Net)
I agree that htmlagilitypack is the easiest way to accomplish this. It is less error prone than just using Regex. The following will be how I deal with scraping.
After downloading htmlagilitypack*dll, create a new application, add htmlagilitypack via nuget, and reference to it. If you can use Chrome, it will allow you to inspect the page to get information about where your information is located. Right-click on a value you wish to capture and look for the table that it is found in (follow the HTML up a bit).
The following example will extract all the values from that page within the "pricing" table. We need to know the XPath value for the table (this value is used to instruct htmlagilitypack on what to look for) so that the document we create looks for our specific values. This can be achieved by finding whatever structure your values are in and right click copy XPath. From this we get...
//*[#id="pricing"]
Please note that sometimes the XPath you get from Chrome may be rather large. You can often simplify it by finding something unique about the table your values are in. In this example it is "id", but in other situations, it could easily be headings or class or whatever.
This XPath value looks for something with the id equal to pricing, that is our table. When we look further in, we see that our values are within tbody,tr and td tags. HtmlAgilitypack doesn't work well with the tbody so ignore it. Our new XPath is...
//*[#id='pricing']/tr/td
This XPath says look for the pricing id within the page, then look for text within its tr and td tags. Now we add the code...
Dim Web As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlWeb
Dim Doc As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument
Doc = Web.Load("http://www.digikey.ca/product-search/en?lang=en&site=ca&KeyWords=AE9912-ND")
For Each table As HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode In Doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//*[#id='pricing']/tr/td")
Next
To extract the values we simply reference our table value that was created in our loop and it's innertext member.
Dim Web As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlWeb
Dim Doc As New HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlDocument
Doc = Web.Load("http://www.digikey.ca/product-search/en?lang=en&site=ca&KeyWords=AE9912-ND")
For Each table As HtmlAgilityPack.HtmlNode In Doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//*[#id='pricing']/tr/td")
MsgBox(table.InnerText)
Next
Now we have message boxes that pop up the values...you can switch the message box for an arraylist to fill or whatever way you wish to store the values. Now simply do the same for whatever other tables you wish to get.
Please note that the Doc variable that was created is reusable, so if you wanted to cycle through a different table in the same page, you do not have to reload the page. This is a good idea especially if you are making many requests, you don't want to slam the website, and if you are automating a large number of scrapes, it puts some time between requests.
Scraping is really that easy. That's is the basic idea. Have fun!
Html Agility Pack is going to be your friend!
What is exactly the Html Agility Pack (HAP)?
This is an agile HTML parser that builds a read/write DOM and supports
plain XPATH or XSLT (you actually don't HAVE to understand XPATH nor
XSLT to use it, don't worry...). It is a .NET code library that allows
you to parse "out of the web" HTML files. The parser is very tolerant
with "real world" malformed HTML. The object model is very similar to
what proposes System.Xml, but for HTML documents (or streams).
Looking at the source of the example page you provided, they are using HTML5 Microdata in their markup. I searched some more on CodePlex and found a microdata parser which may help too: MicroData Parser

Apostrophe problem in multiple-select fields

I have been fruitlessly searching for a solution for the following problem in Drupal.
Making a selection in a multiple-select field (i.e. a list of checkboxes) will yield an "Illegal Choice Detected" error if any of the choices contain apostrophes. This problem is referenced here. This field exists within registration and is not generated through either webforms or CCK.
Does anyone have any exact solution in mind, i.e. specific code to add to modules, or making particular updates?
Try to use one of two php functions to generate strings:
htmlspecialchars
htmlentities

pass data from parent to popup

Apologies if this seems like a duplicate post...
Thomas Warner kindly answeres an earlier post suggesting I use:
Popup.aspx?Data1=Piece_of_data&Data2=Piece_of_data
Just want to ask, if my code is Popup.aspx?Data1=textbox1.text&Data2=textbox2.text
whats the proper way to reference whats in the textboxes?
The way is is above, all that appears in the popup is the actual text 'textbox1.text'
rather than what is actualy in that control.
thanks again
Using asp.net you can litterally write the value straight into the string like:
Popup.aspx?Data1=<%=textbox1.Text%>&Data2=<%=textbox1.Text%>
A more ideal way of doing this would be to build up the URL string in your codebehind so as not to clutter up your HTML and C# code.
That way you could do something like:
String popupUrl = String.Format("Popup.aspx?Data1={0}&Data2={1}",
textbox1.Text,textbox2.Text);
This will also allow you to do any sanitization checks on the values from the textboxes before you start passing those values around.

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