ASP.NET: Create Autocomplete TextBox using AJAX in Asp.net 3.5

Asp.net 3.5 ease our life. As you knew that Microsoft community published a series of controls named ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkt. Which you can download from http://www.asp.net/ajax . The AutoCompleteExtender is one of them. You can use this AutoCompleteExtender in your page to make an autocomplete textbox within just few minutes. You can't imagine how much its easy. In this AJAX tutorial i will show you how one can create Autocomplete TextBox using AJAX in ASP.NET 3.5. The Autocomplete TextBox provides user a nice & cool experience while entering data. Let in your page one of the TextBox is used to enter referrer name. You knew that to the referrer name is a tedious job for yur application user. So you can incorporate autocomplete facilty to give your user best UI experience.

To make an Autocomplete Textbox first create a project. Then opne the default.aspx page in design view. Add ScriptManager , TextBox , Autocomplete Extender from toolbox. Now your HTML markup will be:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>

<%@ Register Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" TagPrefix="cc1" %>

DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<title>Ajax Autocomplete Extender Tutorialtitle>

head>

<body>

<div>

<asp:ScriptManager ID="ScriptManager1" runat="server">asp:ScriptManager>

<asp:Label runat="server" ID="lblReferrerName" Text="Referrer: ">asp:Label>

<asp:TextBox ID="txtName" runat="server">asp:TextBox>

<cc1:AutoCompleteExtender

ID="AutoCompleteExtender1" runat="server" TargetControlID="txtName"

MinimumPrefixLength="2" CompletionInterval="10" EnableCaching="true" CompletionSetCount="3"

UseContextKey="True" ServiceMethod="GetCompletionList">

cc1:AutoCompleteExtender>

div>

form>

body>

html>

Don't confuse for ServiceMethod="GetCompletionList" line from the above code. I will show you how you can create webservice method for Autocomplete Extender. Move your mouse on the TextBox. Then from TextBox control smart tag, select the Add AutoComplete page method option from the provided menu.

After that you will found that a webservice method will be added in your default.aspx.cs page named GetCompletionList. Now you need to modify this method to return your expected set of data. Now look at my code from below.

using System;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Data;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}

[System.Web.Services.WebMethodAttribute(), System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptMethodAttribute()]
public static string[] GetCompletionList(string prefixText, int count, string contextKey)
{
string connectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["TestConnection"].ConnectionString;
SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(connectionString);
// Try to use parameterized inline query/sp to protect sql injection
SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT TOP "+count+" Name FROM tblAgent WHERE Name LIKE '"+prefixText+"%'", conn);
SqlDataReader oReader;
conn.Open();
List CompletionSet = new List();
oReader = cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection);
while (oReader.Read())
CompletionSet.Add(oReader["Name"].ToString());
return CompletionSet.ToArray();
}
}

Don't forget to add the namespace using System.Collections.Generic;

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Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Create Autocomplete TextBox using AJAX in Asp.net 3.5

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