Category Archives: VB.NET

Custom grouping in classic Infragistics UltraWebGrid

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:
Before Grouping
to this:
After Grouping
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. Continue reading →

Error using Crystal Reports 2008 in ASP.NET application on 64bit server

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.

Ultrawebgrid: Highlight row on MouseOver with Selection enabled

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: Continue reading →

UltraWebGrid does not display last column’s right border (solution)

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.

JavaScript IsDate(): Validate date according browser locale

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 Continue reading →

WARP, UltraWebGrid and ScriptManager glitch in IE6 and IE7

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.

“Cannot find column” DataTable error while grouping or sorting Infragistics UltraWebGrid

If you’re binding an ADO.NET DataTable to Infragistics UltraWebGrid and then programmaticaly sort the grid (e.g. add a column to a band’s SortedColumns collection) you may get an error:

Cannot find column My Column Name.

with stack trace starting from grid databinding and finishing in datatable’s sorting:

at System.Data.DataTable.ParseSortString(String sortString)
at System.Data.DataView.CheckSort(String sort)
at System.Data.DataView.set_Sort(String value)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.ProcessDataViewForFillRows(DataView dataView, RowsCollection rows)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.FillRows(UltraWebGrid grid, RowsCollection rows, IEnumerable datasource)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.BindList(IEnumerable datasource)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.DBBinding.DataBind(Object dataSource, String dataMember)
at Infragistics.WebUI.UltraWebGrid.UltraWebGrid.DataBind()

If the grid binds OK without sorting and grouping, but fails with either – most likely the culprit is one of the columns in data table. Continue reading →

Displaying consistent number of links in Infragistics UltraWebGrid Pager

In the previous post I described how using QuickPages property and a bit of creative HTML enhanced pager for Infragistics UltraWebGrid could be created. The only problem with QuickPages – the pager in this mode displays inconsistent number of page links. For example if you set QuickPages property equal 5, the pager will display from 5 page links (when you’re at the beginning or at the end of the grid) to 11 (when you’re in the middle). If you want that number to be consistent, you have to draw the page links yourself. Which turned out is surprisingly easy. Continue reading →

ASP.NET Chart Control is not rendering image

If you’re using MS Chart Control for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (in .NET Framework 4.0 it comes as a part of a framework), you may experience a strange behavior when chart images aren’t rendered on the page:

Chart image isn't rendering

If you’re using HTTP Handler to serve chart images (image URL looks something like “…/ChartImg.axd?i=chart_24dae5cb1f024c4a89f4fe492f05cc59_0.png“) missing mapping in IIS configuration could be to blame Continue reading →