Optimize your ASP.NET data entry validation

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 by Vladimir Enchev | Comments 6

With RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Q3 2008 we introduced our brand new component called RadInputManager. You can find more info about this unique control on following articles:
Introducing the RadInputManager control for ASP.NET AJAX
Using Regular Expression TextBox
Using RadInputManager
RadInputManager First Look

I've made small demo to check how the input manager will perform compared to standard validation approach in ASP.NET and here is the result:

- RadInputManager: 200 standard TextBox controls with skins (hover, focus, empty, negative, enabled/disabled, read-only & invalid styles), in-place validation and formatting and many more.

- Standard Validation controls: Huge render size & JavaScript, no in-place validation (only on submit), no skins, etc.

[RadInputManager | Standard Validation | Download]

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6 Comments

Gavin Howlett-Foster 10 Dec 2008

I understand the benefits of using the RadInputManager from your article and would like to reduce the amount of standard validation controls on my web pages.

This approach only seems to deal with validation of visited text boxes though. Do you have an approach that deals with the user leaving required fields blank and not visiting them before pressing a button that causes a postback?

It looks to me that you need a combination of both types of controls but if you can reduce the number of standard validation controls you will obtain some of the benefits you describe.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.
Todd 11 Dec 2008

@Gavin- With today's solution, I think you're right. There is no way to require a field with RadInputManager. That said, I think it's a very cool idea! Seeing the benefits of RadInputManager over the traditional validation controls should open up the discussion of extending RadInput manager to cover more validation scenarios. Hopefully we can enhance this control in the future to cover those cases.

For now, though, you will need to use a blend to get all the validation you need. Hope that helps.

-Todd
Vlad 11 Dec 2008

Hi Gavin, Actually you can set IsRequiredFields to true and even ValidationGroup however currently this is available only for RegExpTextBoxSetting - we can add this for other settings as well. Vlad
J 10 Jan 2009

Adding the IsRequiedFields and ValidationGroup options to the other input settings would be a great addition and a very valued one at that. Who would need to use a mix and match of ASP.NET validators and RatInput validators at that point? RadInputManager could rule all validations of this type.
Charles 25 Jan 2009

Yes, having to now use both the InputManager and the RequiredFieldValidator kind of defeats the purpose :)

But the concept is definitely cool!

The InputManager also seems to want to apply its own style to a text box. Is there anything that can be done about that?

Is the InputManager supposed to work with the RadTextBox, because it doesn't seem to.
mark howlettt - foser 26 Mar 2009

gavin howlett - foster is bald however very smart, nooby mcnoob. x