Samir George

Styling the ValidationSummary control using CSS only

ausideveloper — Tue, 26 May 2009 12:10:00 GMT

A requirment arised for presenting an ASP.NET page client side errors using the ValidationSummary as show in Fig (1), which is kind of outside the capabilities of what this control can do out of the box as it involves adding an image to each item or <li> element instead of the BulletList. I will use the same example I refered to In my previous post.

Fig (1)

Let's take a closer look at the DisplayMode property of the ValidationSummary control and how it controls the ValidationSummary html output. I am using Firebug to view the rendered html:

1) DisplayMode="BulletList".

As per Fig (2), the output is rendered as an unordered list.

Fig (2)

2) DisplayMode="List"

As per Fig (3), the output is rendered as html text separated by <br /> tage.

Fig (3)

3) DisplayMode="SingleParagraph",

As per fig(4) the output is rendered as one block of text.

Fig (4)

DisplayMode:BulletList (as in Fig (2)) above triggered the solution for me as I can re-style an Unorder list the way I like and this is what I did.

Therefore, by setting the CssClass of the ValidationSummary control to 'validated', that would re-style this control as was presented in Fig (1).

The CSS I used to style the ValidationSummary is as below:

Please if you are interested in having the project files, just drop me a comment and I will email it to you.

Scheduled Tasks in ASP.NET Web Applications using Timers

ausideveloper — Fri, 08 May 2009 22:16:00 GMT

Most of the ASP.NET Web Developers who have their Web application hosted in Shared hosting, do not have much control over the hosting server including having the ability of creating Window Services or create their application specific scheduled tasks.

Recently, while going through the Community Starter Kit code, I found a nice way (basic) of having a timer in the Global.asx Application_Start event as below:

The code in Fig (1) makes a call to a Web Service and this is quite useful and even powerful for small to medium size Web sites, especially if that call is Asynchronous.

Other issues could arise are error handling and performance.

CheckBoxList client side validation using JQuery

ausideveloper — Sat, 02 May 2009 10:54:00 GMT

Recently I had to validate an ASP.NET CheckBoxList control using the ClientSideScript or the ASP.NET JavaScript Framework. I was looking for an easy solution which would satisfy the assumptions below: Validate the CheckBoxList using the RequiredFieldValidator...(read more)