Our team has spent a bit of time working with the latest Ajax Control Toolkit, available at http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit, incorporating it into our SharePoint customizations.
Getting the controls to work in SharePoint requires jumping thru a few hoops – here’s a great article from Mike Ammerlaan at Microsoft to help you get started.
We quickly became interested in the Update Panel and List Search controls. The Update Panel allows you to refresh a section of the page without a complete screen refresh – it makes for a faster response and a nicer user experience. The List Search attaches to drop down controls and, among other things, gives you great type-ahead functionality, allowing you to type your drop down selections. The goal was to make using the mouse unnecessary, allowing users to fly thru the forms much faster.
To start, we were pretty happy with what we were finding. We built out a POC incorporating the Update Panel and List Search controls. (Notice the special section at the bottom of Mike’s article about using the Update Panel.) It was great because we have a complex custom screen in our SharePoint site that has multiple dropdowns with autopostbacks. The type-ahead functionality of the List Search combined with the Update Panel’s partial screen refresh made the page much more user-friendly.
A problem arose in the form of a bug in the List Search control. When typing ahead and tabbing off the control, you would expect the postback event to fire, but it doesn’t. This has been logged as a bug on codeplex, but it doesn’t look like there’s been any activity on it as of this posting. We also had challenges with controlling the tab sequence after postbacks, and with getting good behavior out of using the up and down arrow keys in the dropdowns.
Overall these tools are very good, even if they didn’t meet our immediate needs. I’m sure I’ll be revisiting them in the near future for other solutions.
