jQuery $(document).ready() and ASP.NET Ajax asynchronous postback

The issue is that normally $(document).ready() is called when the DOM is ready to be manipulated. But this doens't happen after an ASP.NET Ajax asynch postback occurs.

This means that the initial jQuery bindings won't be automatically available after the asynchronous postback is over. I underline "automatically" here because my last post describes more possibilities, how this issue can be worked around.

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.

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

By sending only data to the client, you can profoundly reduce the size of what you send and see a substantial increase in performance. You also allow yourself the ability to easily add features like light-weight sorting and paging on the client. This can not only improve your users' experience, but reduce server load and bandwidth requirements.

By sending only data to the client, you can profoundly reduce the size of what you send and see a substantial increase in performance. You also allow yourself the ability to easily add features like light-weight sorting and paging on the client. This can not only improve your users' experience, but reduce server load and bandwidth requirements.

To that end, I'm going to walk you through these four steps to effectively implementing a client side Repeater, using ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery:

By sending only data to the client, you can profoundly reduce the size of what you send and see a substantial increase in performance. You also allow yourself the ability to easily add features like light-weight sorting and paging on the client. This can not only improve your users' experience, but reduce server load and bandwidth requirements.

The muscle behind the actual asynchronous calls comes from JavaScript. I looked around at a bunch of existing JavaScript libraries and settled on JQuery because of the way it leverages existing CSS knowledge. The three things that the library should do easily are: