Reduce ASP.NET Page size and complexity using JQuery

Here I am looking to explain how to call page methods using jQuery. Using jQuery to directly call ASP.NET AJAX page methods

JQuery is the most popular JavaScript library. One of the main reasons for its fame is the plugin architecture. Anyone can create a separate library that leverage the JQuery library. In this article we are going to look at the BlockUI library which is used to block the user screen while performing a task.

When you create a site in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services by using the default Team Site template, the home page includes two default graphics. A Windows SharePoint Services graphic appears in the body of the page, and a picture of a house in a circle appears near the site title. You can change these graphics to customize your site. Changing the smaller graphic requires a Windows SharePoint Services compatible Web page editor

Many call it the ASP.NET jQuery postback problem, but using the technique below should make it no problem anymore. $(document).ready() isn't called after an asynchronous postback. What this means? You lose the functionality that should be executed within $(document).ready() after an UpdatePanel rendered its contents after an asynchronous postback.

jQuery got so close to me lately that I can see myself adding the scripts to my project almost unconsciously. The thing is, jQuery is very useful for me, in almost all situations and it has been a do or die enhancement for all my project since I first put my hands on it.

Of course while using it, you encounter few situations which need a bit of research to solve, mostly when you are trying to combine it with some other technologies like: UpdatePanels and ASP.NET Ajax. For instance there are many situations when I would like to run some jQuery magic based on some decision that I make on the server side.

In the first part of this article series I introduced jQuery's functionality and how it provides a rich client side programming model. This time around I'll expand on these concepts and show you how you can use jQuery in combination with ASP.NET using it as an AJAX backend to retrieve data. I'll also discuss how you can create ASP.NET controls and otherwise interact with jQuery content from ASP.NET pages in WebForms.


jQuery is just a JavaScript library so it will work seamlessly with ASP.NET both from page code as well as through backend driven code using the Page.ClientScript object or ScriptManager. You can use jQuery on its own as a client side and Ajax library that communicates with ASP.NET or you can use jQuery in combination with ASP.NET AJAX. The two actually complement each other quite well as jQuery provides functionality that the ASP.NET AJAX library does not and vice versa. For the most part the interaction between the two libraries is trouble free except for a few very rare edge cases.

Continuing exploring JQuery! I decided to implement a feature to display some kind of details related to a row displayed on GridView. For example when displaying employees details on GridView some information might not fit in the GridView because it will make it huge and wide. These infomration can be diplayed as Tooltip. Or when you want to display a picture and some kind of formated text to be diplayed as tooltip when mouse hover on the image.

Im learning and experimenting with jQuery and ASP.NET. Below is a simple solution I created to highlight rows in a gridview by clicking on a checkbox next to the row.

Gridview setup:

With that, JQuery is officially embraced by ASP.NET.

A brief introduction of JQuery

jQuery is the star among the growing list of JavaScript libraries. A few of its characteristics are light-weight, cross-browser compatibility and simplicity. A common task that sometimes takes 10 lines of code with traditional JavaScript can be accomplished with jQuery in just one line of code. For example, if you want to dress up a table with an ID mytable with alternative color for every other row, you can simple do this in jQuery.

This article explains how to use jQuery's plug-in Tablesorter to implement client-side sorting in an ASP.NET GridView. This comes in handy especially when an ObjectDataSource is used with a GridView as GridView does not provide sorting out of the box.