Matt Berseth

I am currently working on a data-centric web application.  The page I most recently worked on allows the user to browse data from six different tables (a primary table, and five other tables that have 1-M relationships to the rows in the primary table).  A row from the primary table is displayed in a DetailsView.  Below the DetailsView is a TabContainer control with five tabs; each tab contains a GridView that displays the related rows in the other five tables.  Below is a screen shot of what the TabContainer portion of the page looks like.  Live Demo | Download Sample Site When I first developed the page, I bound the DetailsView and each of the GridViews to the corresponding DataSources like I usually do.  Everything worked great in our development environment.  The grids filled nicely and I could move around from tab to tab with no problems.  However, when we moved the page into our production environment loading the page was terribly slow.  In production, we have n-times more data and...

In a previous post I discussed how to use combine the TreeView, GridView and UpdatePanel controls to create an AJAX style folder browser.  I tagged this previous post as 'prototype' with the intentions of coming back to it and updating it to something that is more production ready.  This evening I found some time to work on it again.  I made a couple of enhancements that help both the usability (no more full postback when a folder is clicked in the right hand pane) as well as the codebehind (I created a FileSystemDataSource control for interacting with the file system)   Live Demo: AJAX Folder Browser Download: Sample Web Site [Update 7/25/07] Thanks to some feedback from Bilal, I fixed a bug where clicking on the pdf text would cause the famous PageRequestManagerParserError.  The problem was that I registered the ImageButton as a postback control, but not the LinkButton.  This has now been fixed and...

I recently read a dotnetkicks article where the author laid out an approach for using the ASP.NET AJAX client-side framework to synchronously execute a WebMethod that does some sort of server-side validation or computation.  I believe the idea here was while this validation is executing the page designer does not want the end user interacting with the other elements on the page.  I had not encountered this issue before, but I started working out how I would have approached it.  I enjoyed the authors article and I liked how he leveraged the existing ASP.NET AJAX framework and that the solution should would work with the existing ASP.NET CustomValidator.  Because the operation is synchronous, you can invoke the WebMethod from the ClientValidationFunction and set the IsValid bit to true or false depending upon the result.  However, I am not sure if I would like having the page go unresponsive while this validation is taking place.  Especially if it is unclear to me that the field I entered data into was going to require...

I recently created a folder explorer using a combination of the ASP.NET TreeView and GridView controls as well as the new ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel.  You can view a live demo of the folder explorer here. The code for this sample is at the bottom of the page. [Update 7/24/2007]: Here is another post regarding this, except with a few more enhancements [Update 7/17/2007]: Per Ruckus' comments, I would like to make the following clarifications: The sample provides read-only access to the folders and files, making it more of a 'Folder Browser' instead of an Explorer A full-postback is done when a folder is clicked in the right hand pane.  If you have a suggestion to a nice way to have the Folder image buttons cause async-postbacks instead of complete post-backs, let me know.  I thought about possibly handling the RowDataBound event and explicitly calling RegisterAsyncPostBackControl ... Offically the TreeView control is not supposed to...

If you have worked with the ASP.NET 2.0 GridView control, I am sure you were more than a little surprised when you realized there is no decent way to display the Header or Footer rows of a GridView that is bound to an empty DataSource.  I know I was.  It seems like a bug to me and I am surprised it made it through usability testing.  Anyway, there are basically 2 ways to work around this problem: Make your DataSource's return a special empty row so the grid has something to bind to (see example of this here) Subclass GridView and add this functionality yourself I chose to go with option 2 because because we had already subclassed the GridView for other reasons.  I cheated a little bit and started with the code snippet on the following page.  The GridView control is very complicated and I am not going to claim I understand it entirely, but from what I could...

I was looking for good examples of how the ModalPopupExtender control could be used as a confirmation dialog.  I was especially curious in seeing implementations where the popup is used to confirm deletes performed on rows of a GridView.  I couldn't find any good samples so I figured I would take a shot at it.  Live Demo If you would like to view a running version of the sample, just follow the Live Demo link.  If don't really care about the step by step break down of this implementation you can jump to the bottom of the page to view the full code sample.  As always, feedback is encouraged.      Step 1: Add the GridView to your page, placing it inside an UpdatePanel.  <asp:UpdatePanel ID="updatePanel" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional"> <ContentTemplate> <asp:Label ID="lblTitle" runat="server" Text="ToDo List" BackColor="lightblue" Width="95%" /> <asp:GridView ID="gvToDoList" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" Width="95%"> <AlternatingRowStyle BackColor="aliceBlue" /> <HeaderStyle HorizontalAlign="Left" /> <Columns> <asp:BoundField DataField="ID" HeaderText="ID" /> <asp:BoundField DataField="Item" HeaderText="Description" />...

The web application I am currently working on is a data-centric, internal facing application targeted at the knowledge workers within our enterprise.  A majority of the pages are our core 'search' pages that contain a GridView and a number of input elements for entering search criteria.  Each row in our GridViews contain a hyperlink to a supporting 'details' page that has additional information for the selected row - usually contained in a DetailsView.  Our standard for implementing this has been to render the values for the GridViews primary key column as a hyperlink that takes the user to the details page passing the PK through the query string.  This all works fine and our users seem to be OK with this type of naviagation.  But when I was recently doing some work with the ModalPopupExtender, I was curious if we could improve this flow by keeping the user on the main search page by moving the DetailsView to the ModalPopupExtender.  See the screen...

Yesterday I was fiddling around with my MovableType blog looking for a plug-in for MovableType 3.2 that could render my category tags as a tag cloud  (by the way, I am still looking).  Along the way I came across the following site that had a nifty way of displaying screenshots of their product by clicking on the corresponding thumbnails.  Instead of having the browser take you to a page with the full image displayed by itself, the site displayed the image on top of the page in an ajax modal style window.  Besides just the image, the modal window also contained a few buttons as well as some additional information that was specific to the image.  Very nice.  I was curious of what this would take to implement using ASP.NET AJAX, so I created a sample web site (screen shot is above-right) that allows uses to browse thumbnail images.  When a thumbnail is clicked, the modal window is displayed showing the user the...

Here is a quick tip that you might find helpful when working with the JavaScript proxy classes the ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManager server control auto-generates.  You can view the source for the proxy by entering the following url into the browser: http://[server]/[website]/[webservice].asmx/js  For example, assuming you have created an ASP.NET AJAX web site called SampleWebSite and within the web site there is a web service called SampleWebService, all you have to do to view the JavaScript proxy is navigate to: http://localhost/SampleWebSite/SampleWebService.asmx/js I recently wrote a post describing how ASP.NET AJAX web services can be used with the Microsoft Virtual Earth Map Control to create a nice web based map application (the article is here, the online demo is here).  You can view the JavaScript proxy for the web service I used to look-up the lat/longs for the zip-codes by clicking on the following link:  http://mattberseth2.com/virtual_earth_polygon/ZipCodeService.asmx/js ...

Lately I have been playing around with AJAX progress indicators (gmal-like progress indicator, apply an UpdatePanel to an asp.net Wizard, and animated GridViews).  I saw this one (see screen shot below) on one of the Google Analyitics pages.  I liked it - so I figured I would write up a quick sample using it.  I am not going to go into detail regarding the specifics of the implementation, but the complete source for the page is listed below (it requires the AjaxControlToolkit).  Also, here is the animated gif  and here is the link to the tool that I used to create it.  Enjoy! [Update: 7/31/2007] I have included a link to download this sample website.  The site contains 2 pages both displaying the same demo.  The first page (Default.aspx) uses C# for the codebehind and the second one (Default2.aspx) uses VB. View Live Demo | Download Code Complete source for this example:<%@ Page Language="C#" %> <%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="ajaxToolkit" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0...

Like most people, I use more than a few of Google's web applications on a day to day basis.  I think what I like best about their applications is the elegance of the user interface.  Just recently I started using their analytics web application to learn more about what drives visitors to my site.  One of the pages within the tool is a dashboard screen that displays a handful of different panels, each containing summary information pertaining to the web traffic for my site.  Some of the panels display charts and graphs, while others contain tables with aggregated data.    As you can see, there is a lot of information being displayed on this page.  And as far as the user experience is concerned, this page is great.  It delay loads each of the panels instead of waiting until all of the data for all of the panels has been processed before serving the page.  As a result, the page loads almost immediately and the panels come to life one at a...

By using asynchronous post-backs with the new ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel server control, you have the unique opportunity to improve both performance and user experience of your web pages. [Update: 7/31/2007] Per request I have included the code for the live demo for download Download Code Performance gains are achieved because ... Less data is round-tripped during an asynchronous post-back - keeping the network load light  The browser does not have to rerender the complete page, just the part that was updated The server does not need to generate the full page output, just the portion(s) that are updated User experience is improved because ... Responsiveness is increased as the user can continue to interact with the page while the asynchronous operation is executing The complete page is not always reloading If you are not familiar with AJAX, or if you are familiar but need a refresher, here is a live demo page.  The page contains two GridViews, the top one does not...