foo, bar and donkey : AJAX Control Toolkit

Using UpdatePanels with ModalPopups

kirtid — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:19:05 GMT

Moving an old post over from my old Technet blog to this MSDN blog.

One of the most frequently asked questions on the Toolkit forums and at MIX after Shawn's demo was how to get UpdatePanels to work right with ModalPopups. The trick is to understand that the ModalPopup extender attaches itself to more than just the TargetControl and PopupControl. If you include the OK and Cancel buttons inside the ModalPopup Panel in an UpdatePanel, make sure you include the extender declaration in it as well. If you do not, once a postback occurs the extender will not reinitialize the handlers and you will get null references. Also, if buttons inside the ModalPopup Panel are set to be OK and Cancel buttons on the ModalPopup Extender, then their sole purpose is to close the Popup Panel and run their respective scripts if any have been set. They will not perform postbacks or execute any other client side handlers since the ModalPopup prevents the event from propagating up.

I have attached a sample page that demonstrates three simple scenarios with ModalPopups and UpdatePanels.

ModalPopup with an UpdatePanel inside its Popup Panel: Make sure that the OK and Cancel buttons are not inside the UpdatePanel otherwise the handlers will be rendered useless on postback.
UpdatePanel that contains a ModalPopup Extender and its Popup Panel: Clicking OK or Cancel still does not cause the postback since those buttons are tied to client side handlers. Clicking on any other control will cause the server side handlers to kick in. Since the extender declaration is inside the UpdatePanel, the asynchronous postback causes the ModalPopupBehavior to be reinitialized correctly and any client side handlers are setup again when the request is completed. So if you would like to postback every time the user clicks OK or Cancel, just don't set those properties on the extender. The Modal Popup Panel closes on postback as desired since the entire popup is inside an UpdatePanel.
What if that Popup Panel in # (2) contains an UpdatePanel: Specify the triggers that will cause the outer panel to update and allow the UpdatePanel inside the ModalPopup to operate on its own terms. This time the ModalPopup Panel does not close on postback triggered from within it because the trigger for the outer panel is specifically set to be a separate button.

It is a good idea to design the page without UpdatePanels in mind. When writing the page place UpdatePanels when the rest is done. Once you have the page setup, determine locations in your page that need to be asynchronously updated and the controls that should act as triggers to perform that operation and then appropriately place UpdatePanels with the correct triggers and UpdateMode property set. With extenders it is important that you take into consideration not just the controls targetted by the extender but any others which it hooks into to provide additional functionality.

This post should evolve as I get more feedback and I will update the sample accordingly as well. I hope this helps.

Community in Control!

kirtid — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:50:27 GMT

Lately my Toolkit tasks involve working with passionate members who are making it a great, self-sustaining community project. How is that? They are contributing in the following two ways: Patches : Patches are mostly for small bug fixes or feature additions...(read more)

Toolkit for .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008

kirtid — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 05:12:00 GMT

We have created a new Toolkit release 11119 that goes hand in hand with the official release from the Developer Division in Microsoft of the product code-named "Orcas" that packages a new version of Visual Studio and a new .NET Framework . We have introduced...(read more)

Rich Text Editor is here

kirtid — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:23:41 GMT

I am super excited to announce that Kannan Sundararajan , my colleague at Microsoft, has written a Rich Text Editor control using ASP.NET and JavaScript and shared it under the MS-PL license on CodePlex. It has a very rich feature set and Kannan hopes...(read more)

Custom Tabs

kirtid — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:50:00 GMT

Shawn , the grand Toolkit poobah and my manager, forwarded me a great post by Andrew Cushen that talks about some of the quirks that one runs into when styling Tabs in the Ajax Control Toolkit. We will look into the issue that requires the workarounds...(read more)

How do I contribute to the Toolkit?

kirtid — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 02:42:26 GMT

We have been brainstorming ideas to get community contributions in the Toolkit for almost a year now. After long deliberation we now have a plan and would like to try it out. If these are some questions on your mind? How do I fix a bug in the Toolkit?...(read more)

How to make localization in the Toolkit work for you?

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:44:30 GMT

FAQ # ...: Why does the Toolkit add resources binaries to a website's bin directory? To explain the motivation behind this I have put up a wiki on our CodePlex site that details how to make the most of the Localization features without getting overwhelmed...(read more)

Cascading AutoComplete

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:31:00 GMT

We have received a lot of feedback from users about not being able to pass additional information to the AutoComplete webservice which limits their usage of the extender. We decided to absorb that input and add support to all extenders that issue XmlHttpRequests...(read more)

Toolkit Showcase

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:29:07 GMT

We are compiling a list of websites to showcase on the Toolkit page that is a part of the ASP.NET website . Details on how the page will end up looking like have not been fleshed out yet. Just like this ASP.NET AJAX showcase displays interesting websites...(read more)

Patch it!

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:28:22 GMT

Before I embark on the Patch tool rattle... The Toolkit is a Shared Source Project and builds on top of the Microsoft ASP.Net AJAX technology, formerly known as Atlas. It releases code under the MS-PL license . We have around 15 contributors from around...(read more)

SlideShow navigation

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:20:00 GMT

I have written a simple example that uses the SlideShow extender and demonstrates some of its cool features. The sample... provides additional context to the user by showing the previous and next slides by hooking into the 'slideChanging' event that SlideShow...(read more)

Toolkit Release 10920

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:19:31 GMT

This has been a long awaited release and has lots of important bug fixes. We were unable to get the Test Framework ready in time and hope to get that out later. The release notes talk about it in detail at this new sample website location . The binaries...(read more)

Community Contributions in Toolkit release 10920

kirtid — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:18:35 GMT

When I wrote my previous blog post I was in a rush to make the release announcement because we had a lot of users waiting eagerly for it. But I did not get a chance to thank our users who contributed patches to the Toolkit and made the release a success....(read more)

Welcome!

kirtid — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 19:10:31 GMT

Why a new blog? I talk about the reasons behind the shift here . This blog is a continuation of my Technet blog . I will no longer be posting on Technet. I will port the posts over someday when migration is simpler and/or when I have time to spare. What's...(read more)