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How to Disable Controls During Postback in ASP

The other day, I was working on a page in a webforms app where a postback, triggered by a button click, kicked off a bit of processing that would run from 10-20 seconds. While this is going on, it makes sense to disable the clicked button and other controls, for that matter. Since the processing occurs on the server, the only way to achieve this effect is by disabling the buttons and other controls on the client side, by using javascript. The following is the series of steps leading up to getting this right. If you just want to see what worked, you can skip to the end.

The first thing I did was find a bit of jquery that would disable things on the page. I put this into the user control in which I was doing this:


From there, I found that the way to distinguish between a server-side click handler (“OnClick” property) and a client-side one was to use OnClientClick, like so:


Here we have some standard button boilerplate, the server side event handler “SearchButton_Click” and the new OnClientClick that triggers javascript invocation and our jquery implementation. I was pretty pumped about this and ready to have my search button disable all client side controls and disable them until the server returned a response. I fired it up, clicked the search button, and absolutely nothing happened. Not only was nothing disabled, but there was no postback. After some googling around, someone recommended adding “return true;” after the disableOnPostback() call. Apparently any intervening client side handler not returning true is assumed to return false which stops the postback. So here is the new attempt:


This had no discernible effect, and after some searching, I found that the meat of the issue here is that disabling the button apparently also disables its ability to trigger a postback. We need to tell the button to fire the postback regardless, which apparently can be accomplished with UseSubmitBehavior=false as a property.


I tried this and, finally, something different! Only problem was that it was a partial success. The disabling of controls finally worked, but the postback never happened. On a hunch, I took out the return true and arrived at my final answer:


This combined with the jquery at the top of the page did the trick. So if you have a button that triggers a postback with a lengthy operation and you want to disable all controls until the operation completes and returns a response, this should do the trick. I am not yet an expert in under-the-covers webforms particulars, so the theory is still a little hazy on my end, but hopefully this helps anyone in a similar position to me. Also, if you are an expect in this stuff, please feel free to weigh in on the theory at play here.

On final thing that I’ll mention is that I did find something called Postback Ritalin during my searches. This seems to offer a control to take care of this for you, though I didn’t really want to introduce any third party dependencies, so I didn’t try anything with it myself.

By the way, if you liked this post and you're new here, check out this page as a good place to start for more content that you might enjoy.

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Setting Up AJAX and JQuery

AjaxSo, in response to feedback from my previous post about my   home automation server site, I’ve decided to incorporate AJAX and JQuery into my solution. This is partially because it’s The Right Thing ™ and partially because I’m a sucker for the proposition of learning a new technology. So, here are the steps I took toward going from my previous solution to a working one using AJAX, including downloads and other meta-tasks.

The first thing that I did was poke around until I found this tutorial, which is close enough to what I to do to serve as a blueprint. I found it very clear and helpful, but I realized that I had some legwork to do. I setup my java code as per the tutorial, but on the client side in JSP, I realized things wouldn’t work since I couldn’t very well source a jquery library that didn’t exist in the workspace. I poked around on my computer a bit and saw that I did have various jquery.js libraries, but they were part of Visual Studio, Android, and other concerns, so I figured I’d download one specifically for this task rather than try to reappropriate.

So, I went to jquery.com. I poked around a bit until I found the most recent “minified” version, since that’s what the example was using, and discovered it here. I was a little surprised to find that the ‘download’ would consist of copying it and pasting it into a local text file that I named myself, but I guess, what did I expect – this is a scripted language executed by browsers, not a C++ compiler or the .NET framework or something.

In Eclipse, I made a directory under my WebContent folder called “js”, and I put my new jquery-1.7.1.min.js file in it. Now, I had something to link to in my JSP page. Here is the actual link that I put in:


Just to make sure my incremental progress was good, I built and ran on localhost, and

My project now error’d on build and at runtime. For some reason, Eclipse seems not to like the minified version, so I switched to using the non minified. I still got a runtime error in Eclipse browser (though not in Chrome) and the javascript file had warnings in it instead of errors. This was rectified by following the high scoring (though strangely not accepted) answer on this stack overflow post.

However, it was at this point that I started to question how much of this I actually needed. I don’t particularly understand AJAX and JQuery, but I’m under the impression that JQuery is essentially a library that simplifies AJAX and perhaps some other things. The tutorial that I was looking at was describing how to send POST variables and get a response, and how this was easier with JQuery. But I actually don’t need the variables, nor do I need a response at this time. So, given the JQuery runtime errors that were continuing to annoy me, I deleted JQuery from the proiejct and resolved to work this out at a later date. From here, after a bit of poking around, I realized that using AJAX from within Javascript was, evidently, pretty simple. I just needed to instantiate an XMLHttpRequest object and call some methods on it. Here is what I changed my kitchen.jsp page to be:



Overhead OnOverhead Off

Pretty simple, though when you have no idea what you’re doing, it takes a while to figure out. 🙂

I instantiate a request, populate it and send it. Given my RESTful scheme, all the info the server needs is contained in the path of the request itself, so it isn’t necessary for me to parse the page or ask for a response. I added the javascript:void(0) calls so that the buttons would still behave like actual, live links. I think that later, when it is, I’ll probably bring JQuery back and revisit the tutorial that I found. Here is my updated controller class.

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/kitchen")
public class KitchenController {




	@RequestMapping("/kitchen")
    public ModelAndView kitchen() {
    	String message = "Welcome to Daedalus";
        return new ModelAndView("kitchen", "message", message);
    }
	
	@RequestMapping(value="/{command}", method = RequestMethod.POST)
	public @ResponseBody String kitchen(@PathVariable String command) {
		
		try {
			Runtime.getRuntime().exec("/usr/local/heyu-2.6.0/heyu " + command + " A2");
		} catch (IOException e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		
		return "";
	}
}

I’m fairly pleased with the asynchronous setup and the fact that I’m not playing weird games with redirect anymore. I have a unit test project setup, so I think I’m now going to get back to my preference of TDD, and factor the controller to handle more arbitrary requests, making use of an interfaced service for the lights and a data driven model for the different rooms and appliances. I’ve got my eye on MongoDB as a candidate for data storage (I’m not really doing anything relational), but if anyone has better ideas, please let me know.