Telerik Style Builder

It is available, yes.
You can test it on the following address:

Telerik Style Builder



I think this is a great service, that will help the collaboration between designers and developers a lot.
Currently only few of the controls have the fine tune interface implemented but I think it is a very good start.

radGrid - check if there was a row selected, before selecting another one [2]

The previous post on this topic was about pointing some solution, which doesn't always work.
I think I was able to identify the problem for this issue.

It is becasue the chain of events is the following when you select a new row:

1. RowDeselected.
2. RowSelecting.
3. RowClick.
3. RowSelected.

I am not quite able to find the logic here.
I think in normal english I should be able to say:

"I am clicking on a row."
"I am in a process of selecting a row." (if not canceled)
"I am deselecting the old row."
"I have selected the new row."

At least the RowClick in my opinion should be fired prior the events described above as it occurs before everything else. You are initiating the above chain of events by clicking on a row so all of them should follow in my opinion.

To me the fact that RowDeselected is before RowSelecting is not such a bad solution. I just can't get why the RowClick is between RowSelecting and RowSelected events.

Any clues?

radGrid - check if there was a row selected, before selecting another one.

Okay, we had the radGrid with AllowMultiRowSelection property turned off.
But we needed to check if there is already a selection in the grid (on the client side), then get the item and do some calculations.

So far so good.
But it appeared that it is very difficult to get the previous item selected in a grid when selecting a new one.

The OnRowSelected event as you may suspect is raised too late in order to get this information as the selection is already changed.
So I thought the OnRowSelecting event will be the best time to perform this.

Guess what? It wasn't. At least for me.
Each time I checked the

sender.MasterTableView.get_selectedItems().length > 0

The statement evaluated to false (which means to me that when the OnRowSelecting event is raised AFTER the selection is Clear()).

So I found a workaround to help myself persist the previous selected item of the grid:

var lastRow = null;

function RowDeselected(sender, eventArgs) {
lastRow = sender;
}

function RowSelecting(sender, eventArgs) {
if (lastRow) {
     // There was a selection before we try to select. Do whatever you need here.
}
     else {
     // There wasn't any selected item, this is the first one.
     }
}

To me it seems that problems may arise. I will test some more to see for side effects and will report back.


Any comments are appreciated.

telerik radGrid - be careful with the virtual scrolling under Firefox

Again some issues under Firefox.
We have found a great example of how to populate on demand a radGrid (when scrolling grid scrollbar down to the end it will make ajaxRequest and ask for some more items to fill in the grid with).

We loved this feature and decided to incorporate it into one of our projects.
Unfortunatelly I discovered it won't work pretty well under the FireFox browser.
Let me briefly explain what does the code and then what is the problem, then I will suggest a simple fix.

Here is the demo:
http://www.telerik.com/help/aspnet-ajax/grdvirtualscrollpaging.html

Now, it shows you how to request the items and then reload the grid. So far everything works perfect.
If you however reach the end of the grid items (meaning you are at the last page, or the page count is 1), when you pull the scrollbar down to the bottom, firefox will execute the function which should pull some more records.
Then it will append them and.
So far everything is great!
But it will then magically decide to fire the OnScroll event once again, it will not pull any more records as you already have them in the grid.
And then it will append them.
Then it will again fire the OnScroll event ....
... then it will again fire the OnScroll event ...


Hm, sounds like endless trips to the server and back. That's what happened when we tested.

Now here is the code we had to achieve this:

<ClientEvents OnScroll="HandleScrolling" />

And here is the JS HandleScrolling function:

function HandleScrolling(sender, eventArgs) {
if (eventArgs.get_isOnBottom()) {
$find("<%= RadAjaxManager.GetCurrent(this.Page).ClientID %>").ajaxRequest(sender.get_masterTableView().get_name());
}
}

Now to be hones - I never have even dream of achieving such functionality with 4 lines of code. Kudos to telerik team for architecting the controls this way.
The fix to this issue also bring another feature ;) (not bad but good) - you will not need to go to the server when you already have all the records in your radGrid.

Here is the fixed version of the HandleScrolling javascript function:

function HandleScrolling(sender, eventArgs) {
if (eventArgs.get_isOnBottom() && sender.get_masterTableView().PageCount > 1) {
$find("<%= RadAjaxManager.GetCurrent(this.Page).ClientID %>").ajaxRequest(sender.get_masterTableView().get_name());
}
}

Did you spot the difference?
All i did was to add logical "and" operator to check if the masterTableView page is only one (which means that we don't have anything on the server which should be loaded on the client) and voilla!


Hope this helps someone!

Firefox with Plugins may lead to some problems with telerik controls

I had an issue with the telerik radTabStrip control.
It wouldn't switch the tabs. In some cases you are only able to navigate between the first and the last tab, in some cases you may not be able to change tabs at all.

I was very surprised as telerik is famous for supporting cross browser functionality for all the controls.
I thought the problem may be in my TV but wasn't able to find anything.
A collegue of mine also had some problems using firefox full of plugins with the telerik controls but we never thought the problem may be in the plugins.

In my case the problem was in Interclue add-on used to preload a page for you (when you point a link, the plug in will give you a screenshot of the page that stands behind the link).


So if you ever have problems using telerik controls under FF - please check your plugins first.

Some casing problems I experienced.

As far as I understand, the settings for the code format are in the following Visual Studio menu:

Tools -> Options ->Text Editor

There you have the ability to change things.
I was having some problems reguarding the way my markup is formatted (few of the tags are made lowercase when I hit CTRL + K + D (format whole document)).
So I think the settings for this should be under the HTML -> Format, or the whole path for the menu should be :

Tools -> Options ->Text Editor -> HTML -> Format

I then checked the "Server Tag:" dropdown. It says "Assembly definition", the other options are "As entered", "Lowercase", "Uppercase" but I don't like them :).
Now the issue comes when I have a radGrid with <ClientSettings> or <PagerStyle> sections. To me they must be in Pascal notation (as all other sections and properties), but when I hit CTRL + K + D they are re-formatted to be lowercase.
The issues may be in
1. The telerik assembly itself.
2. Some AddIn conflicts.

It is not a big issue, just decided to share with you.
Please share your thoughts if you faced such issues.

5 minutes C# - get windows special folders path

Just a two lines of code in order to retrieve the path to a special folder of your choice (My Documents, ApplicationData etc):

string strAppData = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData);
DirectoryInfo diMyDocuments = new DirectoryInfo(strAppData);

Here is the Environment.SpecialFolder Enum:

Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData - the data which some applications store about the current user (mostly used for personalized settings), this is for roaming users.
Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonApplicationData - Application data which is common for all users.
Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonProgramFiles - "The directory for components that are shared across applications"
Environment.SpecialFolder.Cookies - The folder where the user cookies are stored.
Environment.SpecialFolder.Desktop - The logical desktop.
Environment.SpecialFolder.DesktopDirectory - this is the directory which is used to store file objects on the desktop.
Environment.SpecialFolder.Favorites - Current user favorite items.
Environment.SpecialFolder.History - Current user Internet History.
Environment.SpecialFolder.InternetCache - Internet cached files.
Environment.SpecialFolder.LocalApplicationData - As the first one but for non-roaming users.
Environment.SpecialFolder.MyComputer - I'll let you figure this out ...
Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments - I'll let you figure this out too ...
Environment.SpecialFolder.MyMusic - ... and this one ...
Environment.SpecialFolder.MyPictures - ... and this one ...
Environment.SpecialFolder.Personal - this one is more important, this directory is used as a repository for documents...
Environment.SpecialFolder.ProgramFiles - this one is clear, I believe
Environment.SpecialFolder.Programs - Contains user program groups.
Environment.SpecialFolder.Recent - Users most recently used documetns.
Environment.SpecialFolder.SendTo - This directory is used for the Send To > item in the context menu. By adding folders here, they will appear in the Send To -> item when you click on a file or folder.
Environment.SpecialFolder.StartMenu - Contains the Start Menu items.
Environment.SpecialFolder.Startup - The Startup group (Start Menu -> All Programs -> Startup).
Environment.SpecialFolder.System - The system directory (%Windir%\System32)
Environment.SpecialFolder.Templates - Document templates repository.


Hope I helped a bit.
Have a great coding.

telerik radGrid - select a row without using select links / buttons and allow it to postback

I was in a need to enable the user to select a row by clicking on it (not by clicking on some Select link or image or button).
I also wanted this click to postback so I can do some processing on the server side.

It is not so hard to achieve, but I was puzzled for quite a while so I decided to share it.

In order to allow the grid to select a row by clicking on the row, you need to add the ClientSettings to the radGrid and configure the following:

<ClientSettings EnablePostBackOnRowClick="true">
<Selecting AllowRowSelect="true" />
</ClientSettings>

AllowRowSelect is the property to enable / disable row selection.
EnablePostBackOnRowClick will tell the grid to post back on row selection. It is really strightforward when you think of it, but checking so much properties / section to find out if the radGrid has the one you need is annoying sometimes.

Anyway, I am glad that the radGrid has this functionality built-in.

Visual Studio Tips & Tricks 1- Re-register the controls in the .designer.cs file (recovering .designer.cs file)

Okay, I suppose all of you know what the .designer.cs file is, but I will shortly explain...

When you add a control to the page (via the markup editor), this control is also registered in the .designer.cs file, so you can have a reference to it in the code behind class (.cs).
So if you have a page Test.aspx, you will have a group of 3 files in it:

1. Test.aspx - this is the markup code, containing HTML and ASP markup, defining the control, css and so on.
2. Test.aspx.designer.cs - the designer file, where all controls are registered as a variables so you can reference them,
3. Test.aspx.cs - the code behind where you add your code. There you can use the controls, referencing them by the ID you gave them in the markup.
What happens behind the scene is that each runat="server" control is registered as a variable in the designer class like this:

protected global::System.Web.UI.WebControls.DetailsView dvMine

I recently did the following mistake - after added a lot of controls, then a lot of code, and a lot of changes to other files, I accidently got the latest version of the designer file (from the source control) of one of my aspx pages. This way I was having the controls markup, but the control registrations were lost. I wasn't able to CTRL + Z until I got my things back as I had already closed / opened the Visual Studio few times.

As a result When I hit F5 to start in debug mode, I got about 20 compilation errors, stating that I am referencing objects that don't exist.
I didn't want to re-register those controls manually in the .designer.cs, neither to delete them in the markup and re-create them (thus registration in the .designer.cs file will be automatically created).

I was wondering what to do, so I finally got the idea. I hit CTRL + K + D (which should reformat your markup) and the missing controls were auto re-created in the .designer.cs file.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Nice tool to help you build IE ready sites

I found accidently this tool:



It can help you make your site run smoother under all versions of IE.
It's name is DebugBar go to the official site here.