In my current project, I created a custom server control that presented the user with questions and answers—they select the answer and move on.
However, a requirement was that the user could push a button and “select all”. Unfortunately, DropDownList objects are not as easy to select as, say, a CheckBox. In addition, all controls are dynamically generated—I knew the IDs, but couldn’t specify the Async trigger in the MasterPage’s Script Manager.
I could, however, find the name of the control and do a bit of magic with it.
Here’s how:
First, in your server control, check to see if a ScriptManager control is even present. For this example, I’m leaving out the try/catches—so we’ll assume that it’s there.
private ScriptManager _scriptManager;
Then, in OnInit (or OnLoad, depending on your controls):
_scriptManager = ScriptManager.GetCurrent(Page);
GetCurrent fetches the current AJAX ScriptManager control from the context you specify—in this case, the current Page object.
Now we’re ready to consume the ScriptManager. First, we ensure that it’s not null AND, most importantly, that the line of code is being hit during an Async Postback. Regular postbacks, for the point of updating an UpdatePanel don’t matter to us.
if (_scriptManager != null && _scriptManager.IsInAsyncPostBack)
{
var fromWhere =
_scriptManager.AsyncPostBackSourceElementID;
The ScriptManager’s AsyncPostBackSourceElementID (seriously, can we get longer field names?) provides just that, a hashed heirarchy of the control that caused the Async Postback. For this to work, it’s important to remember that you must either have ChildrenAsTriggers set to True or have explicitly registered your dynamic control with the ScriptManager.
The hashed output looks like the standard ASP.NET control heirarchy:
ctl00_pbph_tc_ctl01_selectallbutton_123
In this case, when I dynamically created my button, I named it “selectallbutton_{id}” to make it easy to find AND store the information I need in this Select All step.
if (fromWhere.Contains(“selectallbutton_”))
{
var id =
fromWhere
.Substring(fromWhere.IndexOf(‘_’) + 1)
.ConvertTo<int>();
MyMethod(id);
}
The full code block looks like:
_scriptManager = ScriptManager.GetCurrent(Page);
if (_scriptManager != null && _scriptManager.IsInAsyncPostBack)
{
var fromWhere =
_scriptManager.AsyncPostBackSourceElementID;
if (fromWhere.Contains(“selectallbutton_”))
{
var id =
fromWhere
.Substring(fromWhere.IndexOf(‘_’) + 1)
.ConvertTo<int>();
MyMethod(id);
}
}
Now my dynamically created button’s Click event is caught during the Async postback (inside an UpdatePanel), validated, and my custom method is executed—in this event, taking the “id” that was part of the Button’s ID and modifying other controls on the page accordingly.
