Saturday, November 03, 2007

ReOrderList replacement and other AJAX.NET Fun

Having gotten fairly annoyed with the flaky-ness of the AJAX.NET ReOrderList control (among others) I've decided to take a look at building my own. Having had a look at a really great tutorial on javascript drag and drop code:
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/mk/column2/
I've built a couple of custom controls; DragItem and DragContainer. These are part of an in-dev solution I'm building to provide myself (and anyone bothered enough to read on) with lightweight AJAX controls. Mostly because I want to understand the intricacies of this black magic, but partly because I believe the javascript libraries provided by the AJAX Toolkit to be too heavy for inidividual control use.

To justify myself here: I love the Ajax Control Toolkit and think MS are doing a brilliant job, especially when there are kits like:
http://www.telerik.com/
out there. But, and this is big, the dynamically provided javascript libraries which the API requires each browser page to download (assuming the ScriptManager control is placed) are too big. I want a small piece of script, perhaps placed within the page, rather than a seperate file, to perform efficient, fast actions, not replace most of the js API in the browser and watch/handle a million things I'm probably not even aware are going on. Not that I mind those features being there when they're needed!

Anyway, here's a list which might be useful to some:
http://ajaxpatterns.org/DotNet_Ajax_Frameworks

And here's the solution download for my own .NET AJAX controls:
http://home.freeuk.com/eudoxus/JsWebSite.rar