Tab Key in ASP.NET Applications

To make your Web application more efficient and easier to use, you need to remove any difficulty in web form navigation that your user could experience. User interface and web site navigation must be logical, easy to use and if possible: already well-known from other applications. Off course, nobody wants to learn some new complicated and unnecessary things and crawl through a large help files. Users wants self-explanatory interface that they can start to use immediately.

One of common standards is using a keyboard TAB key to move focus forward (or Tab + Shift key to move focus back) between controls on form, instead of forcing your Web site visitor to use a mouse click for changing a focus. Off course, your visitor still CAN use a mouse to set focus in the some text box, but many of them, and they are usually experienced and expert users will more like to use a keyboard only, because it is faster and more efficient way.

Tab order in web form

So, you need to define a logical navigation through a web form using a Tab key. There is a TabIndex property of server controls. First control in form should lowest TabIndex. With every next tab, focus will move to the control with next higher TabIndex. It is pretty simple to set tab order, you need only to care about few common problems:

Problem 1: When we run the page, we can see there is no control with focus when web page is loaded. Much better solution is to have a focus on the right place immediately after page is shown. One solution, which shows how you can set a focus to textbox named txtFirstName, when page is loaded, could be a code like this:

Page.RegisterStartupScript("SetInitialFocus", _
"<script>document.getElementById('" & txtFirstName.ClientID & _
"').focus();</script>")

Problem 2: Focus moves through a web form, but also goes to Web browser address bar, Google or Yahoo toolbar etc. It is more expected that focus should move only inside the web form, instead to goes to browser address bar. Let say the last focus in on the button named "btnOK" and we want when user press tab key, move focus to the first textbox "txtFirstName" and skip browser toolbars, address bars and other distraction things. You can do it with next piece of code:

btnOK.Attributes.Add("onkeydown", _
"if(event.which || event.keyCode)" & _
"{if ((event.which == 9) || (event.keyCode == 9)) " & _
"{document.getElementById('" & txtFirstName.ClientID & _ 
"').focus();return false;}} else {return true}; ")

You don't want to move a focus to specific control?

For some reason, you don't want to some control receive a focus. That could be a case if, for example you have an invisible text box or some search text box on top of the web page, but you want to allow tab functionality only to few main controls on the web form. Simply set TabIndex property of server control, or tabindex attribute of HTML control to -1. When you run web page and hit tab key, controls with TabIndex = -1 will never get a focus. Although, user can click into this control with a mouse and set focus on that way.

How to type TAB key in textbox or textarea

Sometimes, you don't need to move cursor to the next control when hit Tab key. What if you need to type Tab character into text box or text area as a part of the text? Off course, your user can type tab in Notepad or some other text editor and simply do copy/paste to your form, but it is not so elegant solution for your Web application :). Instead of that, you can use script like this (in text box named txtLongText):

txtLongText.Attributes.Add("onkeydown", _
"if(event.which || event.keyCode){if ((event.which == 9)" & _
"|| (event.keyCode == 9)) {document.getElementById('" & _
txtLongText.ClientID + "').selection = " & _
document.selection.createRange();" & _
txtLongText.ClientID & ".selection.text = " & _
" String.fromCharCode(9);return false;}} else {return true}; ")

Or better, to avoid hard coding, you can put this code to function named EnableTabType. Function has only one parameter, which specifies what is TextBox control where you need to enable typing of Tab characters.

Public Sub EnableTabType(tb As TextBox)
    tb.Attributes.Add("onkeydown", _
    "if(event.which || event.keyCode){if((event.which == 9)" & _
    "|| (event.keyCode == 9)) {document.getElementById('" & _
    tb.ClientID & "').selection=document.selection.createRange();" & _
    tb.ClientID & ".selection.text = " & _
    " String.fromCharCode(9);return false;}}else{return true};")
End Sub

Tab key endnote

Default value of TextBox AutoPostBack property is false. If you set it to true and if text in TextBox control is changed, tab key will cause form to submit. After submiting, it is possible to loose a focus on current control, especially if you used javascript on page load to set focus initially. In that specific case, you can register client script dynamically and only if Page.IsPostBack value is false.

Swapnil (Swaps)

http://swapsnet.spaces.live.com/

 

Hi Again..

 

If you want to Parse HTML using .NET Framework Assembly, here's the article

 

 

Swapnil (swaps)

 

Folks,

 

I spent some time before I found a pattern to work with dynamically created controls in ASP.NET that satisfied my requirements. I tried multiple approaches and faced multiple problems. If you'd like to avoid getting into the same problems I got, learn about them here first.

 

Check out this Link

 

 

Swapnil (swaps)

Automating your build process is very important. An automated build process can detect new issues in a timely manner which means there is a lot less code to have to look at to figure out why it broke. However, it can be time consuming to put together a build process and, if it's not automated enough, can become a source of bugs as well.

So what do you do if you have more projects in your application that can reasonably be put into a solution? How do you run your automated build? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just point to a directory and compile all of the projects under it in the correct order based on the dependencies already defined in your projects?

The source that is included with this article will do this! Just give it a root directory or text file and it will build an MSBuild project that you can use to compile your projects in the correct order.

Check out this link to Download and Detailed information about the Article

 

Swapnil (swaps)

 

Folks,

 

Folks,

Every one of us is well aware of problems posed when debugging client side script code. This article talks about various new techniques and troubleshooting tips that help debug client side script code efficiently in Visual studio 2005.

Check out the following Link.

http://www.beansoftware.com/ASP.NET-Tutorials/Client-Script-Debugging.aspx

Swapnil (Swaps)

http://swapsnet.spaces.live.com/

 

 

Folks,

           Would like to share wonderfull article on Hot to make a Gmail Like Loading Indicator in you ASP.NET page with the help of Ajax. Find the below like which covers the complete article and download the source code for the same

 

 

Swapnil (Swaps)

 

 

This seems to be a common question that we hear frequently: How do I download a file from a Web site, but instead of displaying it in the browser see it as a file that can be saved (ie. see the Save As dialog)?

Normally when you link a file that file will always display inside of the browser because the browser loads it and automatically determines the content type based on the file extension. So when you click on a link like a jpg image the browser knows it's an image and will display that image. You can of course always use the browser short cut menu and use the Save Target As option to save the file to disk.

If you want to do this automatically when a link is clicked from the server side, you have to send the file back yourself rather and add a couple of custom headers to the output. The way to do this is to use Response.Transmit() to explicitly send the file from your ASP.NET application and then add the Content Type and Content-Disposition headers.

Check out this link for futher details and code snippet.

 

Swapnil (Swaps)

 

Folks,

 

Any programming model has its common performance pitfalls, and ASP.NET is no exception. This section describes some of the ways in which you can avoid performance bottlenecks in your code.

 

 

Swapnil (Swaps)

 

 

 

Folks,

 

This article approaches JavaScript from the perspective of an ASP.NET developer who is comfortable with the paradigms and patterns of either C# or Visual Basic. The article doesn't look at how to use JavaScript from ASP.NET exactly, but it does look at why JavaScript is so different from the two languages we commonly use with the .NET CLR. The article assumes you already know that JavaScript is a loosely-typed language (because you don't have to declare the type of data you store in a variable), and that the syntax is similar to the C family of languages (with charming curly braces and stunningly beautiful semi-colons).

 

Check out this link for details.

 

This article is by K. Scott Allen

 

Swapnil (Swaps)

 

            

 

To overcome this, can use Multi Select Dropdown list box control. It is a user control and can be used directly on pages very easily. It allows the user to select multiple items from the list and the selected items will be displayed in comma separated format in the text area, and it can also persist the selected items.

 

 

Folks,

 

Folks,

              Here are listed some of the existing companion tools for .NET development, access the following site to view more details and download the components http://sharptoolbox.com/categories/asp-net

 

Swapnil (Swaps)

Greetings Folks,

Every one of us have accounts in different web sites: Email, Banks, Forums, etc…

The most annoying part is the need to remember all the user names and passwords.

There are some commercial products that provide a way to save this login information and automatically fill the forms whenever a web site is navigated.

In this article it has been demonstrated how it is possible to create your own application that will do exactly this: Remember all the usernames and passwords for you and do a single sign on .

Base on what is show here, everyone with some .NET knowledge can build a simple WebBrowser dedicated to such sites.

For detailed explanation, Check the link http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Automatic_Login.asp

Swapnil (Swaps)

http://swapsnet.spaces.live.com/

ViewState corresponds to a hidden HTML form field in the WebForm interface. Only string data can be stored there. Since Serialized data is string data it can be stored in ViewState, but As to Arrays, they do not implement iSerializable. Since Arrays cannot be stored in ViewState

Instead use, Session State is memory. You can store anything there.

Have a look at below article to understand View State

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972427.aspx

Rgds,

Swapnil (Swaps)