A recent client application used some 3rd party controls which gave nothing but trouble. They had a different programming model to learn, were expensive, and seemed buggy with various design time errors grinding my PC to a standstill. They were primarily used to pop-up a modal gridview search results panel with a “waiting” spinner while loading and allowed the user to select an item to refresh the primary page underneath.
I’m generally not in favor of for pay controls because of the maintenance, distribution, reliability, and programming issues related to them. You’re locked into a single upgrade path and can’t switch back without rewriting your app. I began to wonder how to simulate this functionality using more standard techniques with the Ajax Control Toolkit, jQuery, and normal gridview and panel controls.
The result is a small sample ASP.NET page which allows the user to search for items (or leave blank for all items) and have results “pop” up in a modal gridview panel. The user selects an item and the selected item details are displayed below the search box. In real life, an ID could be saved allowing the parent to look up or fill in details for the selected record. The panel could be styled to look much nicer, but this gives a basic approach. The “Applications” tab contains more details, or click here for the applications page,
Here’s the sample application, or you can examine the code here.
Trev's Tech Tidbits 