How to refresh an opened popup extender panel

Question

I have a gridview where I have button for each row. After clicking this button, the Modal PopUp Extender Panel is opened (with PanelName.Show()). The Panel contains a user control, which shows some labels, textboxes,etc. with an additional info binded form SqlDataSource. Until this point it works well. But, when I click another button, the panel is purely shown but the content is not refreshed (based on which button is clicked, some details info should be shown). Basically, the method SqlDataSource_Selecting is called only for the panel popup showing but not anymore.

How can I force panel to be refreshed (reloaded) after each PanelName.Show()??

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If I'm understanding your question correctly, I think the problem is that you just need to re-Bind your data bound controls after the user clicks the button to change the Selected item. You can use [ControlName].DataBind() to do that. Does that make sense?

Answer 2

It depends on whether the control(s) you want to refresh are DataBound() or not.

In other words, can you force the control to reload by using a DataBind() method call to force the control to reload itself, with either the same or new data? Most GUI controls have the DataBind() method, but it's useless if the control is not actually using data to work!

This is why in your case your panel is not "refreshed" with new data because using a DataBind() on the panel does nothing. Using a databind() on the entire GridView is a different story and should work. Maybe place an UPDATEPANEL around the whole lot? If you do you have to be careful your normal edits and other Commands on the rows will continue to work.

However, What you can do is place the modalpopupextender inside your TemplateField, and using a "trick", you can keep your server post backs and still fire the popup panel.

ie

    <asp:UpdatePanel ID="upADDMAIN" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional">
        <ContentTemplate>
            <asp:Button ID="btnADD" runat="server" Text="NEW LOGIN" BackColor="Blue" Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="#FFFFCC" OnClick="btnADD_Click" />
            <asp:Button ID="btnDUM" runat="server" style="display:none" />
            <div style="height:20px">
            </div>
            <ajaxToolkit:ModalPopupExtender ID="mpeADD" runat="server"
                targetcontrolid="btnDUM" 
                popupcontrolid="upADD" 
                backgroundcssclass="modelbackground">    
            </ajaxToolkit:ModalPopupExtender>
            <asp:UpdatePanel ID="upAdd" runat="server" UpdateMode="Conditional">
                <ContentTemplate>
                    <asp:Panel ID="pnlADD" runat="server" Width="700px" HorizontalAlign="Center" CssClass="auto-style10" Height="200px">
..
..
                        <div id="puFTR" class="auto-style17" style="vertical-align: middle">
                            <asp:Button id="btnOK" runat="server" Text="OK" style="width: 80px" OnClick="btnOK_Click" />
                            &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
                            <asp:Button id="btnCAN" runat="server" Text="CANCEL" style="width: 80px" OnClick="btnCAN_Click" CausesValidation="False" />
                        </div>
                    </asp:Panel>
                </ContentTemplate>
            </asp:UpdatePanel>
        </ContentTemplate>
    </asp:UpdatePanel>

As you may see, the btnDUM control is a Dummy to get the MPE to work, but it's not actually used as it's hidden by the style="display:none" tag.

However, the btnADD does work because it calls a Click() method on the server side which does the refresh of data on your new row. You may have to use a little jScript to pass the ROWINDEX into the Click() method for it to work with a GridView.

Incidentally, the Click() method in my case "controls" the MPE manually...

protected void btnADD_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            ClearADDform();
            mpeADD.Show();
        }

 protected void ClearADDform()
        {
            txtLOGIN.Text = string.Empty;
            cbISActive.Checked = true;
            txtPWD.Text = string.Empty;
            ddlAgent.SelectedIndex = -1;
        }

In my case, the above code example is outside a GridView, so you'll need to adjust.

But the point is, you can still have Server Side calls using Ajax popups!

Good luck.