Code Corner

Infragistics UltraWebGrid offers a nice grouping feature: when the grid is in OutlookGroupBy mode, you can group similar data with very little coding required, you can go from this view:

to this:

by just dragging columns to designated area.

But what if you want to group by first letter of a name or a year of a date? New WebHierarchicalDataGrid control offers this functionality after 10.2 release of Infragistics NetAdvantage, but if you invested years of work in classic UltraWebGrid - it's not easy to move to a brand new control cold turkey. There're other methods that offer custom grouping for UltraWebGrid, but the ones I found were pretty convoluted (like create a hidden column, populate it with data to group by etc.) Here is a simpler approach. Read more...

If you're using Crystal Reports 2008 in your ASP.NET application, and after deploying to a 64bit server getting following error:

An error has occurred while attempting to load the Crystal Reports runtime. Either the Crystal Reports registry key permissions are insufficient, or the Crystal Reports runtime is not installed correctly. Please install the appropriate Crystal Reports redistributable (CRRedist*.msi) containing the correct version of the Crystal Reports runtime (x86, x64, or Itanium) required. Please go to http://www.businessobjects.com/support for more information.

then switch your application to 32bit mode. In case of Windows 2003/IIS6 entire server will have to be switched, in case of Windows 2008/IIS7 a dedicated 32bit application pool can be established for your application.

A while back I posted a method to highlight rows on mouse over in Infragistics UltraWebGrid. Over the time turned out that it had several limitations the main being: if you enable additional styling for some elements of the grid, they're not preserved after mouse-over/mouse-out events. For example if you set a SelectedRowStyleDefault property with a different background and then move mouse over a selected row - that style will be removed.

So, here's a complete solution to work around that limitation: Read more...

IE6 just won't die. I know, continue to support it is a bad idea, but unfortunately many developers have no choice, some environments, especially corporate intranet will continue to use it until second coming (and then Safari will rule the world).

So, here is a small tip: If you need to use a named color from CSS3+ specification that old tired browser doesn't understand - just use color's hex equivalent instead. For example instead of

style="border: solid 1px LightGray;"

which will do nothing in IE6 use

style="border: solid 1px #d3d3d3;"

which will render nice light-gray border.

If you're using Infragistics UltraWebGrid and experienced an odd behavior where the grid does not display the right-most vertical border line - there's a workaround.

By default 2 elements contribute to the grid border - border from RowStyleDefault property and border from FrameStyle property. For some reason IE6/7 (yes, some people still use those) do not render the right border of the last column, even though all 3 properties (BorderColor, BorderStyle and BorderWidth) are set. So the solution is to have FrameStyle lend that border:

1. Expand RowStyleDefault -> BorderDetails property and set StyleRight to None - this is done, so the double border won't render in IE8 and other browsers where the border is displayed correctly in the first place
2. Expand FrameStyle -> BorderDetails property and set ColorRight, StyleRight and WidthRight properties to the desired color, style and width (e.g. LightGray, Solid, 1px)

As a result, the right border is displayed correctly in all versions of IE.

In one of my recent projects I needed to validate whether user's input is a valid date, and this needed to be done client-side, in browser prior submission to the server. Lazy as I am, I Googled for a ready-to-use code snippet. There're plenty of versions out there, but most of them offer incomplete solution and none of them take into account browser locale, you know - the language settings:

So I decided to cook something of my own Read more...

This is probably a very obscure situation, but it happened to me, it could happen to someone else. Scenario: an ASP.NET page with Infragistics UltraWebGrid inside of a WARP panel. A button outside the WARP serves as a trigger for partial postback. First click on the button causes expected partial postback, but on the second click page does full postback and is screwed after that. The issue happens only in IE6/7, page works correctly in IE8.

Another condition - page contains ASP.NET AJAX ScriptManager control with ServiceReference path pointing to an ASMX WebService.

Turned out the issue was caused by project being left in debug mode (in web.config debug="true"). Which caused WebService page to be loaded with parameter "jsdebug" in query string. Which apparently IE6 and 7 didn't like very much. Switching to debug="false" in web.config solved the problem.

Hyperlinks are designed for clicking, to lead you somewhere else, but sometimes this  behavior is undesired. In my case a grid control displayed some HTML data in its cells (including hyperlinks) and clicking on those links caused some undesired effects. I still wanted to display HTML and allow clicking on other grid elements (e.g. checkboxes) just needed a way to prevent hyperlinks clicks.

Remember that events bubble? That gave me an idea to wrap the grid control in a DIV to catch click events. This way I can check event source and if it's a hyperlink - cancel the event, otherwise allow it. Well that's pretty much it. Here's a stump for the DIV wrapper:

<div onclick="return checkClickSrc()">
    <!-- Controls to check go here-->
</div>

and here's the JavaScript code that does the check:

function checkClickSrc() {
    return event.srcElement.tagName != 'A'
    //for firefox: return event.target.tagName != 'A'
}

Why would Starbucks erect this wooden fence on the roof?

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