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Showing posts from December, 2008

ATLAS AJAX Control Toolkit AutoCompleteExtender with Key Lookup

I like the ATLAS AJAX Control Toolkit. It integrates with Visual Studio and has useful if not basic javascript functions that can help a website be much more interactive. The AutoComplete Extender is used to provide auto-complete functionality to a text box. To use it, you simply add an extender and a web service method that provides a list of strings based on the text that the user started typing. So, if you are trying to provide the exact string that the user is typing (ala google search help), you can use it out of the box. However, sometimes you want more list-ish functions, that is, you want to present the user with a list of valid choices that represent objects, not just the descriptions. One alternative is to use a Listbox with a ListSearch Extender. This extender is used to find an existing value within the listBox. The downside to this approach is that every item you are looking for has to be in the list. This can be rather unwieldy if the list has more than a couple dozen i