RadAsyncUpload Q2 Improvements

The Q2 release is finally here and I am excited to talk about some of the changes in one of the newer controls in the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX Suite – the RadAsyncUpload. If you browse the live demos, you may not notice any differences immediately, but that’s simply because most of the changes are under the hood. Let’s have a look…

First the most important new feature, seen above – Multiple file selection! RadAsyncUpload now allows users to select multiple files at once in the File Selection dialog which is very handy in scenarios where uploading a large number of files is needed. You can see this in action on our live demos.

The second improvement is that File Size validation now works client-side in the browser. Users no longer need to wait for the file to upload just to be informed that the file is too large – all this can happen in the browser before the upload starts.

Another great improvement is in the Progress Area – it also works client-side and is now much more responsive and precise as it no longer needs to communicate with the server.

There are other, not so obvious, improvements that allow for certain scenarios to be implemented that were not possible before like uploading directly to a database as shown in our Image Uploader example.

All this is possible because RadAsyncUpload is now internally powered by the Flash plug-in which offers much more interaction with files than browsers allow otherwise. If Flash is not installed or it is disabled, RadAsyncUpload will fall back to its regular HTML-based mechanism of uploading and will behave as before. The best part is that all of this works automatically and you only need to set MultipleFileSelection="Automatic" if you want to allow multiple file selection.