In the previous part I talked about how to build the client control. In this part I'll show how to put it all together to build an ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Server Control. You can view the demo that demonstrate control usage here.

The good thing about ASP.NET AJAX is that it supports fully programmable interface for both Server and Client control. And make a connection between both control. So you just need to put the control declaration on the ASPX page and ASP.NET will make it work for you. On the other hand, you have full access to the client APIs so that you can do some manual calls to the client APIs as well.

Building the Server Control:

This is an ASP.NET AJAX Extender control. Means it extends existing ASP.NET control to enable ASP.NET AJAX on it. In this case this extender extends ASP.NET Panel control, that is why it is called CollapsiblePanelExtender. Here is an article to show you in details How To build Extender Controls.

Basically jQueryCollapsiblePanelExtender I am building here inherits directly from ExtenderControl. This required to implement 2 methods GetScriptDescriptors and GetScriptReferences which I am going to explore later. But now, I want to take your attention that I am using jQuery, and I wanted the developer to have the option to specify the path of the jQuery library. If he/she did not specify the path, the default path is used, which is the the one hosted by google at http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.2.6/jquery.min.js. To do that I made a property and Call jQueryScriptPath that gets and sets jQuery javascript library path.

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At the end of the last month (September 2008) Microsoft announced that it will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward. It was a great news for all ASP.NET developers who are jQuery fans as well as jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX folks like me. Before and after that, there were many posts made around the same subject. It will take a full post to list all these posts. But it would be easy for me to list ASP.NET jQuery heroes around such Rick Strahl, Dave Ward and Matt Berseth. There are many other heroes around such as Bill Beckelman who made a great collection of ASP.NET with jQuery Demos.

For specific posts around ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery I recommend to refer to the following posts by Dave Ward's blog:

• Using jQuery to display a modal UpdatePanel confirmation.
• Using jQuery to enhance ASP.NET AJAX progress indication.
• Avoid this tricky conflict between ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery.
• Use jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX to build a client side Repeater.

Introduction:

We all heard about and maybe worked with ASP.NET AjaxControlToolkit! A set of wonderful controls, but they are heavy, maybe not all of them but many of of them. Beside they require lots of script files which increase the response size.

I was thinking of building jQuery UI Widgets to clone some of AjaxControlToolkit controls. And after Microsoft announcement about jQuery I had another idea! I always liked how ASP.NET AJAX component model, both client and server models. It is easy to build ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Controls especially for ASP.NET control developers. ASP.NET AJAX client and server architecture really ease the development ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Controls and also the core ASP.NET AJAX client library has no massive performance issues, and it is widely used.

On the other hand, I loved the ease of using jQuery as well, how fancy it provides UI Effects and manipulation of DOM. Many many things I wished to have in ASP.NET AJAX were exist in jQuery. So I though of building an ASP.NET AJAX Enabled Control to clone the existing AjaxControlToolkit's control CollapsiblePanelExtender. And use ASP.NET AJAX client and server component model while using jQuery for UI Effects. In this case it would be collapsing (Slide Up) and expanding (Slide Down). [View Demo]

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On part 1 and part 2 I explored how to apply 2 different inheritance models (TPH & TPT) in Entity Framework. In this part I'm going to demonstrate associations between 2 base entities. And how to filter end properties to return specific type (sub entity). Download the sample.

Review Association Ends:

In previous part when I added department tables to the entity model diagram, an associations between Person and Department entities was automatically defined. This relation actually demonstrate the relation between Administrator and Department. It is one-to-many relationship where one person can be administrator of one or many departments.

A collection of Departments is created on Person table and therefor it is inherited on all sub entities! But this make no sense, as a student or instructor has nothing to do with this collection. Beside on the other end at Department a property of type Person is created -I renamed it to Administrator-, while this shouldn't be just any Person, this Person must be of type Administrator.

A few modification should take place in here. The existing association should be deleted and the association ends should be define between Administrator Entity and Department Entity. To do that follow the following steps:

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