Introduction:
Last month I posted about Building a grouping Grid with GridView and JQuery. And I got feedbacks about how to do the same thing using AJAX (on demand retrieving of detail data). In fact I was thinking of that too, and I had couple of ideas in mind. One of them it to use nested update panels, or use AJAX Data Controls with page method/web service method calls along with ASP.NET AJAX. You can view the [demo here].

I didn't like the nested update panel idea, although it is the easiest I think. And was started to think about the second idea but I was about to check another way other than ASP.NET AJAX as long as I'm using jQuery. So I was thinking of using jQuery AJAX. That was just after reading Dave Ward's post Using jQuery to consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services.

More...

UPDATE: I've posted an update to this post to apply on demand loading of Details data using ASP.NET AJAX PageMethods. I'm demonstrating the usage if CollapsiblePanelExtender client events on the new post. Check it out.

I admit, Matt Berseth is really inspiring me! Few days ago I pass through 2 of his great posts:

• Surrounding your Data Table and Dialog Controls with ComponentArt Styled Panels
• Building a Grouping Grid with the ASP.NET 3.5 LinqDataSource and ListView Controls

The first one is pure design tips one which I used for making good presentation of my demo here. The 2nd post is actually the idea.

Here I'll do the same idea Matt presented in his post, but I'll user ASP.NET 2.0 simple stuff plus ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit CollapsiblePanel control.It is required that you have ASP.NET AJAX Extensions installed to be able to run the sample code.

I'll not go through the presentation tips mentioned in Matt's post, I'll just show my technique to implement grouping idea with GridViews and CollapsiblePanel along with SqlDataSource which of course can be replaced with ObjectDataSource. I should mention that I'm using same style sheets provided in Matt's sample code along with images [View Demo]. More...

Last year (2007) on March I joind CSharp-Online community. It is Wiki Media based community web site. Actually that was the first time to use Wiki. I was always watching Wikies but never touch them. I liked that Wiki. It is easy and smart or may be I'm a dump.

Anyway, I had finalized my first contribution on there and it is about Creating Custom ASP.NET AJAX Client Controls. I've built this article on top of this tutorial
"Adding Client Capability to a Web Server Control Using ASP.NET AJAX Extensions".

Hope it will be useful for someone.

UPDATE:
Matt Berseth posted a detailed information about this tip on his post Bug Bash: Enabling/Disabling the ASP.NET AJAX Timer using the Control's Client Side API. Much clearer and explained in details. [May 08, 2008]
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from about 2 weeks I wrote an article about how you can use ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Timer control in a real world scenario side by side with RssToolKit.

The idea it to display RSS feed from deferent location in cycle using ASP.NET AJAX Timer. I also had an idea of pausing the Timer when the user move his mouse over the update-able area "Group Box that display feeds inside it". Of course this should be down from client side.

I searched the documentation for Client Side APIs related to the AJAX Timer control but I didn't find any. I had to hack inside AJAX Timer client library downloaded with ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, and I found what I want.

First I though that by setting client side enabled property using set_enabled(false) of the AJAX Timer I could get what I want; actually I was wrong, this will not pause the Timer.

Dig deeper, but not for too long, I found 2 methods _startTimer() and _stopTimer(), those were excatly what I was looking for.

bellow is a sample client code of how you can use these 2 methods:

   1: function startTimer() { var timer = $find("<%=ajaxTimer.ClientID%>"); timer._startTimer(); }

   2: function stopTimer() { var timer = $find("<%=ajaxTimer.ClientID%>"); timer._stopTimer(); } 

The above code assuming that you have an AJAX Timer control on the page named ajaxTimer. Call these method from your client side code, or add them as event handlers on your target elements.

I don't know why these are not documented, or we are not supposed to use them?! Actually I don't know. I thought that after using these methods the browser will cause a problem regarding client scripts, but both Opera and IE worked just fine without any problem. Also I didn't notice any slow down or hanging in both browsers.

Hope you find it useful.

Back to April 2007 I posted about building an ASP.NET AJAX ComboBox. It was an attempt to rewrite a ComboBox Control I made to fulfil certain issues I faced with 3rd Party Controls. One of those issue was performance as most of 3rd Party control are rendering heavy HTML because of extinsive features they put on their controls which I do not need. So This post is supposed to be an extensions to my old post as well as my article about building Simple ASP.NET ComboBox.

Attached to this post is the ASP.NET AJAX ComboBox. The archive is also containing 3 other very simple controls. The controls are developed using ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. Client Side Controls are written using Script#. I've posted earlier about Script# and my experience with it, so feel free to have a look at that post.

Now back to ASP.NET AJAX ComboBox. The control is very simple, you can consider it as composite control of simple ListBox and TextBox, however it doesn't inherit from CompositeControl. It directly inherit from ListControl to support binding out of the box and many other features that do need any to be rewritten. More...

• AJAX Application Architecture, Part 1
• AJAX Application Architecture, Part 2
• Managing the User Experience in AJAX