Contents tagged with ICallbackEventHandler
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Weird trap while using WebForm_DoCallback() inside my external client scripts
Today, while I was trying to move large portions of a web application I'm working on from Ajax.NET to ASP.NET AJAX and callback support, I've bumbed into a weird trap related to how callback targets are resolved at server side.
The story begins with me trying to adapt a custom control in such a way that events that originally got fired at client side through the elegant Ajax.NET APIs would instead get fired via ASP.NET callback; the reason behind this decision is twofold.
First of all, I've chosen to leave behind Ajax.NET because I'd like to start using a "standard" library for my ajax behaviors. Even if I've never run into any problems using Ajax.NET and I've loved it for quite some time, I hope Microsoft will make their best effort to support and integrate this platform inside the ASP.NET framework, even better than any other ISV could. Then, why callbacks and not, for example, async postbacks? Well, to my surprise, I've ascertained async postbacks are quite verbose in their communications. Since my project goals include saving as much bandwidth as possible, I've looked for an alternative. Callbacks come to my rescue... And average payloads of this technology are very similar to Ajax.NET ones.
Back to my original problem. I started preparing my control for callbacks support: I've coded its implementetion for ICallbackEventHandler interface and called ClientScript.GetCallbackEventReference() in its OnInit (...in vain, just to setup the callback support. Very annoying!). Now I was trying to use the WebForm_DoCallback function inside my javascript code; yes, I'm using an external script file, so I've no way to use the ClientScript.GetCallbackEventReference() method to obtain what I was looking for.
At first, it seems WebForm_DoCallback expects the control ID of the target as its first argument. So, I've retrieved the control's ClientID and fed WebForm_DoCallback with it. Everything worked as expected and I was very happy: the test page that was hosting my control played very nice.
But, suddenly after I've moved my control inside another page, a page which uses a master page, the trick ceased to work. After my callback started, the page on the server side answer with an exception saying: "The target ... for the callback could not be found or did not implement ICallbackEventHandler.".
I will not tell you how much time I've spent in trying to understand what was wrong with my code...
In short, the answer to my problem was that WebForm_DoCallback() does expect the UniqueID of the target control, not the ClientID. If you miss this point, you will get callback support that wouldn't work with master pages!