Atlas Update Panel, not updating!?

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I've recently been digging pretty deep into the most recent Atlas bits from Microsoft and so far so good.

Today we ran into a farily big snag with the Update Panel. We managed to get it fixed and its quite obscure so I wanted to write it down for later....

We have a simple form, with or without a masterpage, and in that form we place the typical ScriptManager and UpdatePanel. In the UpdatePanel we put a Button and a Label. Pretty simple stuff, right?

The button, when clicked did the typical Atlas style, inline, postback to the server and the method was getting called, but the UI in the UpdatePanel itself was not getting updated. I ran fiddler and it showed the request to the server and the correct content coming back from the server; but still the UI in the UpdatePanel was not updating.

So we started to eliminate all the extra stuff around the interface and it boiled down to our CSS documents and specifically the <link /> tags. It seems that if these link tags are not well formed XML (ie properly closed) then you see this behaviour.

Something to watch out for in the future.

Posted: Jun 13 2006, 04:01 PM by Rob Chartier | with 15 comment(s)

Filed under: Atlas

Comments

ScottGu said:

The link tags are weird and can cause browser-specific issues. There are also a few tags in html where self-terminating causes problems, but having a close tag is ok.

I think specifically I've run into issues where you have a <script> tag that is referencing an external .js file. <script/> will break some scenarios, but <script> </script> works.

# June 13, 2006 10:18 PM

Rob Chartier said:

Smells like an item for the FAQ to me!

# June 13, 2006 10:31 PM

Glav said:

Good catch Rob and thanks for the heads up. I do take great pains to make sure everything is well formed but it is easy to miss and you can pour over these small things for ages.

# June 13, 2006 11:13 PM

Michael Schwarz said:

Yes, this is a problem because scripts are using XML, so the document must be well-formed. As I can remember it is also only working if using XHTML document type, not 100% sure.

# June 14, 2006 1:05 AM

Ted said:

Much thanks for the heads up - sooner or later we would run into that one.

# June 14, 2006 12:27 PM

gregor suttie said:

Similar things happen with anthem.net

# June 14, 2006 1:34 PM

Mike Meyers said:

many thanks for the tip - I thought I would add another find to the mix. While dealing with the same problem, I found (and verified) that comments in javascript blocks are also touchy. I had a comment in the form of '// --- comment' and wasn't getting any update. Changing the comment to '//' fixed the problem.

# August 6, 2006 11:34 PM

Phil C said:

I was frustrated with my Master page (containing the ScriptManager) and my Content page (containing a ScriptManagerProxy, UpdatePanel and some Async Triggers).

After some scouring, I found that web.config shouldn't have this line:

I removed it, and BINGO. Hope this helps someone in the future.

# November 29, 2006 7:13 PM

Neil M said:

Phil C, you da MAN. Your comment just concluded weeks of frustration with seemingly inoperable update panels.

# February 18, 2007 1:10 PM

Jignesh said:

i have gone through all the above given scenarios but still my updated panel is not updating the contents.

# March 8, 2007 6:43 AM

AJAX Update Panel « System.Errors + brickbats said:

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