Matt Berseth

If you use AJAX in your web app's, you no doubt have made use of some sort of progress/status indicator that lets the user know that some operation is currently executing.  In the app I am currently working on we use an animated gif for this.  It works great, but sometimes you might find it nice to have more control over the indicator - i.e. interacting with it via JavaScript and styling it using CSS. So I did a little research and found a nice example of one built using script.aculo.us.  The demo page looked great so I downloaded the source to get a feel for how it worked.  I liked what I saw so I thought I would create a new AjaxControlToolkit control based on this example.  My original goal was just to port it over to ASP.NET, but as I started playing around with it I thought I...

Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A while back I wrote a post describing how the DetailsView, GridView, UpdatePanel and the AjaxControlToolkit's ModalPopup controls could be used to implement the common Master/Details UI pattern.  I cheated a bit when creating my original example in that I didn't really complete the implementation - the Save button on the popup didn't actually do anything.  Since writing that post I have received a lot of email and a number of people left comments asking me to complete the example - so here it is.  If you plan on reading through this article, I recommend playing around with the demo site to get a feel for how the page works.  All data changes are only persisted to memory, so don't worry about messing up the data set. Live Demo | Download Scenario I am sure everyone is pretty familiar with Master/Details style of editing data, but just in case -...

Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

I created a new theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer  control and I was going to write a post discussing how I did it.  But as I was creating the post I realized that I have really written about all of the details before (see my TabContainer Archive page).  So instead of repeating myself, I decided I would instead put together a post that catalogs the Tab themes I have created so far and pull of them together into a single demo site that showcases each of these themes.  I plan on adding to the gallery as well as this post as new themes are added.  If I like how it works I might create similar pages for some of my favorite ListView and GridView themes as well.   Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF and Opera) | Download   Google Analytics Theme Opera Theme LinkedIn Blue Theme LinkedIn Gray Theme Gray Theme...

Comments (9) | TrackBacks (2)

Here are three quick tips you might find useful when using the Toolkit's Tab control.  I included demo's for all three tips so you can get a feel for how it looks and behaves. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera) | Download   #1: How To Change the Selected Tab When the Tab Header is MousedOver By default the tab control will switch the selected tab when a different tabs' header is clicked.  Depending upon the content you are displaying, you might find it useful to change the selected tab as the user mouses over a different tab.  I saw an example of this on designflavr.com.  This site has a tab control that displays the categories and tags and some other miscellaneous links.  These items are collected into a tab control that has been placed in the right hand sidebar.  You can get this mouseover style navigation by adding only...

Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are a couple more themes for the AjaxControlToolkit's Tab control based on the tabs found on LinkedIn.com.  Below the screen shots are a few bullet points discussing how I created them.  If tab theming is new for you - it might be helpful to check out these other samples as well ... Five AjaxControlToolkit Tab Themes created from DynamicDrive.com Dev.Opera.com Style TabContainer Theme JQuery TabContainer Theme with Tab Transition Animations Using CSS Image Sprites with the XP Themed TabContainer More Sample AjaxControlToolkit TabContainer Themes ... Creating a YUI TabView Style Theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer Control As usual, here are the links for the demo and download ... Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF, Opera 9.26)  | Download (.Net 3.5 and AJCT 3.5.11119.0) Tab Header Images Different images are used all three tab states: {Default, Hover, Active}.  Each tab is made up of 2 images, the left edge and the...

Comments (6) | TrackBacks (2)

YUI recently added another button type to their control library - they call it the Glowing Button Control.  The Glowing Button Control allows you to add a glossy, glass like effect to your buttons along with a glowing background.  The YUI documentation says the inspiration for the design came from the Aqua buttons found in Mac OS X.  Below is a progression of screen shots that try to show the glowing effect, but you should really check out their demo page to get the full effect.       A project I am working on could use something like this to liven up a few of our screens.  We are prototyping a new design for our landing screen and of course we want it to be as sexy as possible.  The purpose of the landing screen is to let the user know about what our product is about and have them sign...

Comments (28) | TrackBacks (1)

I found a few images on dynamicdrive.com and thought they would make a nice theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's Tab control.  Check out the live demo page to see if it is something you can use.  If it is - help yourself to the download. Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download If you haven't worked with theming the Tab control before, here are a few links ... Creating a YUI TabView Style Theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer Control More Sample AjaxControlToolkit TabContainer Themes ... Using CSS Image Sprites with the XP Themed TabContainer JQuery TabContainer Theme with Tab Transition Animations Dev.Opera.com Style TabContainer Theme Below are the style rules I used for these tabs.  And here are the rules for the red tab.  The rules for all of the other colored tabs are exactly the same, only the background image url changes. That's it.  Enjoy!...

Comments (15) | TrackBacks (4)

I was browsing ajaxrain's catalog yesterday and I cam across a pretty nifty jquery plugin called liScroll that allows you to turn an ordinary HTML UL/LI into a scrolling ticker.  Besides scrolling the items from right to left, the liScroll plugin supports two additional features It allows you to specify the scrolling speed by changing the value of the travelocity parameter The scrolling automatically pauses when you mouse over it After seeing the liScroll demo, I was certain that this was something I could use for some of the sites I am working on.  So I decided to see what it would take to implement a scrolling ticker control using the AJAX Control Toolkit.  In addition to the liScroll features listed above, I also wanted to incorporate a few other enhancements, including Support both left-to-right and right-to-left scrolling directions Support applying a CSS class to the item when it is...

Comments (18) | TrackBacks (3)

I spent some time playing around with the AutoComplete control to see if we could use it to provide smarter filtering capabilities for our data tables.  The general idea was that I would allow the user to select a filter column from a drop down list.  Then as they key in characters into the adjacent textbox I would use the AjaxControlToolkit's AutoComplete extender to suggest some values to filter by.  You can see this in the screen shot below.  I selected 'City' in the drop down and then typed 'be' into the textbox and like magic the 3 cities in my data set that have start with 'be' appear.  Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (.Net 3.5 and Toolkit 3.5.11119.0) If you are interested in how I created this sample, the details are below. The AjaxControlToolkit's AutoCompleteExtender If are familiar with Google Suggest, the concept behind the AutoComplete control...

Comments (26) | TrackBacks (1)

A few weeks ago I wrote a post explaining how the AjaxControlToolkit's Slider control could be used as a data pager.  One of the teams I am currently working with has adopted this approach and is implementing it throughout their site.  While this technique seems to work well, one feature the team would like to add is a custom tooltip that not only displays the typical paging statistics (i.e. page X of Y), but also gives the user a hint as to what can be found on each page of data.  It's this last bit of information that increases the value of the tooltip.  Not only are we showing the user the typical paging statistics, but now they can get an idea of what data can be found on the page before actually navigating to it.  Below is a screen shot of how this looks.  Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and...

Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

A while back I wrote a post about adding animation effects to the AjaxControlToolkit's Tab control.  The demo I created for the post used the toolkit's FadeIn animation to fade the selected tab into view as it became active.  I thought this turned out pretty well, however I noticed that after the fade animation finished running the tab's text contents remained a little blurry.  Compare the before and after.   To see this for yourself, open the demo page and click on the 'Play Fade Animation' button at the top of the screen.  Notice how the text looks a little blurry after the animation runs?   Ted Glaza responded to that original post and provided a hint as to what might be causing the problem The problem you're seeing with the FadeIn animation has to do with how IE and ClearType work together. Searching "IE ClearType Opacity" should provide more details....

Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the designers on our UI team requested a screen mockup with a page layout that is similar to your typical email client.  The page is divided vertically into 2 panes.  The left pane contains a 2 level hierarchy of categories and subcategories.  As the user selects different subcategories the designer wants the right pane's content to be updated with the corresponding information.  Just like Outlook, the designer wants the subcategories to be displayed within expanding and collapsing panels. I am familiar enough with the AjaxControlToolkit's Accordion control to know that it should be the right tool for the job here, but I haven't actually used it before.  So I did a little research on the Accordion and created a small demo page that we used to get a feel for how the control behaves and what it takes to build and style it. Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and...

Comments (31) | TrackBacks (3)

I was browsing through the YUI developer site and came across another component that I thought would make a nice addition to my ever growing toolbox.  It's their Logger Control.  The YUI guys have created a floating debug console window that displays messages as they are written to the YUI log object.  You can check it out for yourself on their demo page.  Besides just displaying the messages, the Logger Control also supports a few of the other standard log browsing features, including Viewing messages by severity (info, warning, or error) Viewing messages by source (global or LogReader in their sample) Pausing and clearing the trace Collapsing the trace console window Repositioning the trace console window by 'drag and drop' Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (ASP.NET 2.0 and Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) I think this Logger Control could be quite useful.  ASP.NET AJAX has a similar concept, however...

Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

As far as web development goes, I came a little late to the party.  I started life as a developer working on the absolute guts of a fairly complex object persistence engine.  At my next stop I hand-coded an obscene number of business objects that fed our presentation layer (which is pretty ironic considering I just worked on an ORM!).  Needless to say I didn't stay at that place too long.  From there I finally took a stab at user interface when I took a gig as a WinForms developer.  I did that for a little over a year and it was OK.  Finally I ended up where I am now, about 60% of my day to day activities includes web developer on Microsoft's ASP.NET 2.0 platform.  I did a little bit of web development with 1.1, but nothing substantial.  Hands down, I enjoy web development the best (I have never once been complimented on how nice...

Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently researching what advantages ASP.NET 3.5's new ListView control would have over the GridView.  To continue down this path, I thought it would be a good idea to look into how paging work with the ListView.  To direct my research, I created a sample data table that supports paging via the standard paging buttons as well as with a slider bar.  Below is a screenshot of the table.  As usual you can follow the links below to view the live demo as well as download the code. Download (.Net 3.5 and AjaxControlToolkit 3.5.11119.0) | Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) If you are interested in the implementation details, they are outlined below. Overview of the DataPager Control Before today, I had not yet worked with the DataPager.  So to start off, I went out to MSDN's documentation and read through it.  To summarize MSDN, the DataPager can be used to display paging navigation controls...

Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

While waiting for VS 2008 Web Developer to download, I took some time to browse through the Visual Studio Express site.  I am not usually a fan of sites that use a black background, but I thought it actually looked pretty good here.  The contrast between the white text and black background makes it hard to look at for too long, however in general the site gives off that sleek and cool vibe that I am certain the designers were shooting for.  One visual item in particular that caught my eye was the nice reflection effect all of the images on the page had.  Check it out in the screen shot below.    Live Demo | Download (IE6, IE7 and FF) I have briefly looked into this before so I was curious how this page had implemented it.  I opened up the IE Developer Toolbar and took a quick look.  For this page, the developers created a single image that contains both the image and the reflection.  You can...

Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

I use Yahoo! for my email client.  The main screen has the standard email client three section layout.  One area for selecting a folder (Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, etc...), another area that displays the messages in a table or grid, and the last region shows a preview of the selected message.  You can select messages to delete, forward, move by clicking a checkbox to select the messages, and then by clicking the button that corresponds to the action you want taken.      Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (This includes the complete AjaxControlToolkit solution plus the code for my patch) I am currently building a new screen for a project I am working on and I would like to use a similar design.  I want to allow the user to use checkboxes to select rows.  Once one or more rows are selected, clicking a command button (Delete, Copy, Export) will execute the actions...

Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

While doing some research this afternoon I ended up on dev.opera.com.  Its a nice looking site.  The combination of colors, fonts, and images make browsing the sites content enjoyable.  I was especially impressed with the tabbed menu that sits at the top of the page.  The tabs are rounded, have rollover states and are very professional looking.  So during some downtime this afternoon I created a new theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer control using the same images and styles as dev.opera.com.  Because I have created a few themes before (jquery, yui and technorati), I was able to reuse the general structure of one of my previous stylesheet's and just plugged in my new images.   Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (.Net 2.0 and Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0)  Tab Header Images This tab theme uses images to form the rounded corners.  The original images on dev.opera.com didn't have transparent background, so I used Paint.NET to set the background transparency (if you haven't used...

Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A few posts back I described a technique you could use to add Animation effects to your ModalPopup controls.  A similar technique can be used to implement a JQuery style fade animation that runs as the user navigates between selected tabs.  While the technique I used is very similar to the one I blogged about before, I thought I would pass along the stylesheet for the JQuery tab theme as well as a quick overview of how I implemented the transition. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) JQuery Tab Theme Creating this JQuery theme wasn't too difficult.  I grabbed one of the stylesheets from a theme I had created before and tweaked the style attributes to what was required to look like the JQuery tabs.  My JQuery themed stylesheet is divided into 3 sections: common styles, styles for the inactive tabs and finally the styles for the active tab.  Just...

Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was in college I took a course on Software Construction.  With 3 weeks left in the semester, the professor assigned us a project that he knew would take close to 6 weeks to implement.  To meet the deadline he allowed us to leverage 3rd party components where possible.  He encouraged us to think about a solution that was constructed from other components as opposed to one that we developed from scratch.  This professor was good.  This is exactly the same type of problem I encounter everyday. Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) I took this construction approach on a recent project.  Our team is looking to soften some of our UI elements by using the toolkit's RoundedCornerExtender control.  The toolkit's rounded corner implementation does not include anti-aliasing and as a result, the corners look pretty rough. (Anti-aliasing is a technique that is used to make graphics and text easier to read.  Here is...

Comments (22) | TrackBacks (0)

The web application I am currently developing has a fair number of popup windows.  Some are modal, some aren't.  All open new browser windows and this annoys more than a few of our users (I hate popup's too, so I guess it shouldn't be that surprising).  So as a team we are looking into replacing our popup windows with the ModalPopupExtender and PopupExtender AjaxControlToolkit controls.  This is just fine by me - I have worked with the toolkit's popup controls on other projects and they worked quite well (It also saves me the pain of writing custom JavaScript for communicating between browser windows).  Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) So as an R&D task, I created a page that implements a simple 'Tip of the Day' popup control.  The functionality is basic - you click a button and the Tip of the Day panel is displayed.  Once displayed, you can click that 'Next Tip' button to fetch the...

Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

Like I mentioned in my last post, I have been researching ways to make our web application a little more user friendly by including a handful of personalization features.  This research was oringally spawned from one of our more savvy users that was tired of always confirming deletes via our delete confirm dialog.  Our standard thus far has been to include this confirmation step at every place within the application where we allow the user to perform a delete.  For some users this confirmation step has become a little annoying.  So I nominated myself to look into what it would take to include the typical 'don't ask me this question again' checkbox to our confirmation dialogs. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0)        Notes on the Demo: Use the 'Reset Profile' button if you want to see the confirm dialog again I removed the connection string from the download's web.config.  You will need to point to your existing...

Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

On my work and home PC's I have my browser's homepage set to google.com.  Like the rest of the world, for about the past 7 years or so I have been using google as my starting point for Internet searches.  Sometime within the past year I took the time to setup google's personalized homepage - igoogle.  I configured my homepage with a nice blend of sporting and tech related gadgets.  I like this because it gives me a nice dashboard to the content that interests me most. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download (Uses Toolkit Version 1.0.10920.0) One of the silly features I have found that I like about igoogle is how the pages color palette changes depending upon the time of day.  So as the day progresses from morning to afternoon to evening the colors on the page change as well.  Like I said, I know this is a silly feature, but I like it.  And I have asked...

Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently wrote a posting showing how GridView mouseover effects can be added to your existing GridView's through the use of a AjaxControlToolkit extender control.  In the last portion of the post I mentioned how I thought it would be useful to add other features into this extender to support column and header cell cell hover and select effects.  So on a recent road trip to Orlando FL I added a couple new features to this extender control and built a handful more grids to show off the new enhancements.  One of the new GridView themes uses the Sharepoint 2007 calendar color scheme and the other is derived from the ExtJs Data Grid.  All of the grids can be viewed on the demo site and of course you can also download the full source.   Live Demo (IE6, IE7 and FF) | Download The GridViewControlExtender now includes support for applying column hover and select CSS classes to cells that are in the same column...

Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

In a recent post, I created a GridView that with the help of some JavaScript and CSS rendered similar to the Tablecloth style table shown here.  I like the Tablecloth sample because the presentation of the grid changes as the user interacts it.  It does a good job of keeping the user focused on the data elements the they are currently working with.            Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download   The design of the Tablecloth grid is fairly simple.  It boils down to adding and removing CSS classes to the individual HTML Table elements (mostly TD's and TH's) in response to a four different DOM events (mouseover, mouseup, mousedown and click).  For example, when the mouse cursor is positioned over a particular cell in the table, the mouseover event fires and a bit of JavaScript runs and applies a CSS class to all of the cells that share the same rowIndex or cellIndex.  The image below shows how this works.  When the mouse is positioned over...

Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

The calendar control that my team is using in our current web application is terrible for three reasons: it is ugly.  Viewing the control reminds me of the first time I went back to Window's 95 after having upgraded to XP it opens the calendar control in a new browser instance (something our users hate) it has a lot of supporting, custom JavaScript that has had its fair share of bugs If I am not mistaken, somehow the control survived the port from classic ASP to ASP.NET 1.1 and then again from ASP.NET 1.1 to ASP.NET 2.0.  I have no idea where the control orignally came from, but it is time to get rid of it. Live Demo (IE6, IE7, FF) | Download So my latest research tasks was to look into replacing this legacy control with something a little hipper.  I took a look at the AjaxControlToolkit's Calendar control to see if it was something we could use.  Sure enough...

Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

If you follow my blog, you have no doubt noticed that I have been taking a tour through the Yahoo! User Interface Library (you can read my previous posts here, here and here).  Well, I think I have finally made my way through a majority of the content and feel like I have come out with a few new UI components that I can incorporate into my current web app.  But before I move on, I thought I would write one last brief post describing how you can incorporate the YUI style progress panel into your existing ASP.NET AJAX web application. Live Demo (FF, IE6 and IE7) | Download The markup for the progress panel is below.  <asp:Panel ID="pnlPopup" runat="server" CssClass="progress" style="display:none;"> <div class="container"> <div class="header">Loading, please wait...</div> <div class="body"> <img src="img/activity.gif" /> </div> </div> </asp:Panel> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode...

Comments (24) | TrackBacks (3)

If you have read a few of my most recent posts (here and here) you have probably noticed that I have been spending some time with  Yahoo!'s YUI control library.  During my most recent visit I came across a great looking confirm dialog.  It's simple and straight to the point ... Live Demo (FF, IE6, IE7) | Download The team I currently work on had already been debating whether or not we needed to replace our existing standard confirm dialog with something a little better looking.  Watching the demo pretty much sealed it.  So I signed up for investigating what markup and style classes were needed to get this dialog into our application and working with the AjaxControlToolkit's ModalPopupExtender control.  The following are the steps I did to accomplish this ... Design the HTML Structure and CSS Classes Our existing confirm dialog is not CSS friendly.  That made tweaking the look and feel a little harder than it should have been.  So this time around, I...

Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

I recently stumbled across the following post.  In the entry, the author describes a simple modal popup he has created for his hotel reservation ASP.NET AJAX web application.  While developing the popup control, he ran into a problem when trying to include both a 'Close' button at the bottom of the dialog as well as a close 'X' button in the top right corner: I ran into a bit of a stumbling block because I wanted to have multiple buttons close the popup.  I had the OK button and the cancel button centered and vertically aligned at the bottom of the window, but I also wanted a cancel button in the top right  (ie "Cancel [X]") - with the familiar [X] that we know and love for closing something.  The problem is, I couldn't figure out how to assign more than one control to the CancelControlID.  Live Demo | Download [Update 10/3/2007]: As Koen points out, the...

Comments (20) | TrackBacks (2)

I recently blogged about how to create a YUI TabView theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer control.  As a follow up to this entry, Peter Kassenaar asked the question: I just don't quite get how the CSS is able to extract the different (background) images from a single sprite.png file. I've googled for this, but that didn't help me much. Can you point us to a direction where this is further explained? This would give me the perfect opportunity to clean up my /images folder on the various themes of a project... In the YUI theme I created, I used a single sprite image and used CSS to pinpoint the location within the sprite for the background image of the tab panel header's.  Peter is asking how I did this.  To be honest, I just reverse engineered the CSS style attributes from Yahoo!'s demo site along with the exact same sprite image...

Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

After working on a YUI TabView theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer control, I thought it might be fun to create a few more TabContainer themes for some of the other tab-style controls that I have seen floating around the web.  I was especially curious in seeing what it would take to include images in each of the tab panel header's.        Below are the controls I was targeting, where on the Internet I found them, and a short description of what it took to create the corresponding theme.  If you are not familiar with how theming the TabContainer works, I recommend reading the documentation for the TabContainer control.  Download | Live Demo | View Stylesheet   Technorati Tab Theme I like Technorati's tab control because it simple, yet in my opinion it still has a nicer presentation than the default xp style TabContainer theme.  Here is a link to the page where I found this control. Notes: To use this theme, include a link to...

Comments (23) | TrackBacks (1)

I was browsing the YUI documentation and I came across a very nice looking tab control.  I thought it would be interesting to create a similar styled theme for the AjaxControlToolkit's TabContainer control.  I don't mind the default XP-themed TabContainer, but I think the XP style tab's are getting a little bit dated.  I had not previously created a theme for a TabContainer, so I had no idea what to expect.  It turns out it was very easy to do.  Below are the steps I followed ... Live Demo | Download Code [Update 10/1/2007] : Updated CSS so it would work with IE6 Check out here for additional TabContainer theme Check out here for an XP without the roll-over flicker   Read the 'Tab Theming' Section of the TabContainer's Documentation Because I haven't created a custom theme for this control yet, I needed to do a little research before getting started.  I read through the paragraph on the toolkit's sample site that explains how...

Comments (25) | TrackBacks (4)

I recently stumbled upon this site again.  I remember on my first visit, I thought it was pretty cool how the modal popup's incorporate subtle animation effects that give the pages a little extra pop.  If you go to the site you can check it out for yourself.  Try clicking on any of the 3 images on the page and watch closely for the animation.  [Update: 9/20/2007] I followed up with Ted Glaza on his comment and he provided some additional information.  I included the email thread at the bottom of this post. Live Demo | Download This page appears to be using PHP, but I thought it might be interesting to re-engineer the modal popup using ASP.NET AJAX plus the ModalPopupExtender control from the AjaxControlToolkit.  I figured there should be some way to run an AjaxControlToolkit Animation when the dialog is displayed ... It turned out this was a little more difficult that I...

Comments (11) | TrackBacks (3)

I was recently reading Dan Wahlin's excellent 'How To' for creating a GridView extender control.  While I was going through his code samples, I thought it might be interesting to create another GridView extender that allows you to resize the column widths of the GridView by clicking and dragging the header cell borders.  Before I went down the path of actually implementing the extender control, I wanted to get a feel for what the client side code for handling this might look like.  So I quick created a sample application where I added this functionality to the Google Analytics GridView I blogged about in an earlier post. ** Because this sample is a proof of concept, I only tested in IE7.  If I move the code to an extender control I will go back and test it with other browsers.  Live Demo | Download Before I get into the implementation details, here is a quick screen shot of the grid. ...

Comments (18) | TrackBacks (2)

If you have been working with Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX components, you are probably very familiar with the $get and $find JavaScript shortcut functions.  If not, here is a quick refresher. $get Overview $get can be used as shorthand for the document.getElementById and element.getElementById functions.  The $get shortcut function points to the Sys.UI.DomElement.getElementById JavaScript function which is defined as part of the ASP.NET AJAX client side library (which means you will need to include a ScriptManager on the page to be able to use it).  $get accepts two parameters, the first is the ID of the DOM element you want to retrieve, the second is the parent element of where the search starts.  The second parameter is optional and when it is not supplied defaults to the document element.  Here is the official API reference. If you happen to step into $get during a debugging session you will find that it basically comes down to the following function ... function get(id, element) { // validation code...

Comments (12) | TrackBacks (1)