Telerik blogs

Thank you to all of the attendees of my first Telerik webinar – the Q1 2013 update for our AJAX controls.   There was a tremendous amount of content to share, and I ran through an amazing 13 demos.  I had a great time writing the demos, and it was a challenge to code four of them live on the webinar.

The source code and slides are available. The recorded video is also available now.  Please be sure to download a trial version of the AJAX controls, a trial version of JustCode, and the full FREE version of OpenAccess to get the full experience of using this code.  When you are working with my code, be gentle, I was writing demo-ware.  None of these samples is a bulletproof solution.

In Review

During the webinar, I showed four new controls: DropDownList, DropDownTree, SearchBox, and PivotGrid.  I showed you the three new skins available starting in 2013: Glow, BlackMetroTouch, and (my favorite) Silk. Donut Chart about Donuts We took a quick look at the Persistence Framework and new Zip Library APIs provided.  We then saw the new features of the ImageEditor, Lightweight rendering of the RadComboBox, Bubble Chart and my Donut Chart of Donuts.  I showed you briefly how Model Binding works with our RadGrid.  We have a great blog post about Model Binding in the Q1 release available as well.  Finally, I showed the BarCode control could be exported into a PDF when working with a RadGrid template column.

I apologize for not allowing for more time for questions and answers during the session.  We have collected your questions presented during the session, and I (with some help from my developer friends) have answers for you below.

Questions and Answers

Q:  Will the persistence framework be compatible with HTML5 offline storage? 

A:  We haven’t considered it yet, but there is a request on the Feedback Portal for the RadGrid to have client-side persistence.  I have posted a comment suggesting this feature request be expanded to cover the entire Persistence Framework.  If you like this idea, click through the link to the feedback portal and vote it up.

Q:  Can RadBarCode render DataMatrix barcodes?

A:  Not currently.  I have added a feature request for Data Matrix barcodes to the feedback portal.  Please vote this feature up if you would like to see it implemented.

Q:  Do you have any examples with PivotGrid in SP 2010 web part , Everything created programmatically?

A:  We do not currently have any samples using the PivotGrid in SharePoint.  You could mimic a sample from our demos page that creates the PivotGrid at load time.  I’ll look to put together a blog post in the near future showing how to do this.

Q:  Can you export the PivotGrid?  Could it be exported to PDF, Excel, etc?

A:  Not yet, but we hope to have PDF export this year

Q:  When would you use a RadDropDown v. RadComboBox?

A:  My colleague Bozhidar put together a great blog post called ‘Meet the better-performaing and more lightweight DropDownList for ASP.Net AJAX’ describing exactly this decision.


Q:  Does the SearchBox search by the DataTextField?

A:  Yes

Q:  Are there any plans to have AJAX Controls rendering Kendo UI controls on the client-side?  Wondering what's the strategy to adopt for supporting mobile devices better on our site.

A:  We don’t have plans to have rendering that just renders the Kendo UI controls. As to mobile support, we are just going to make sure that we handle touch events properly and that no matter you don’t have mouse and a keyboard you still can use all the features of the controls

Q:  Can RadSearchBox be used with a service?

A:  Yes, check out this demo on using the Searchbox Client-Side templates with the Netflix OData service.  The RadSearchBox can be bound to WCF or standard ASMX services.

Q:  Does the new DropDownList control allow for autocomplete lie the RadComboBox?

A:  No, the AutoCompleteBox and SearchBox controls have that feature.

Q:  Can you read QR Codes yet?

A:  No, we don’t have a QR Reader control in the suite.  A friend has written a nice blog post about using barcodes with your website.

Q:  Is there a global option to enable Lightweight render mode for all controls at once ? (web.config / global.asax etc )?

A:  Currently it is available at control instance level only.  You can enable this also at the control type level. E.g.

<appSettings>
 
  <add key="Telerik.Web.UI.ComboBox.RenderMode" value="lightweight" />
 
</appSettings>


Q:  Does every control support LightWeight rendering?

A:  Only the RadComboBox supports lightweight rendering.  A few more will have this feature added in Q2 2013.

Q:  Can the ZipPackage utilize encryption or passwords?

A:  This is not currently supported.

Q:  Is the RadProgress Manager obsolete? If not any idea of how we could use it in a webFarm ?

A:  The ProgressManager is not obsolete.  At the moment it is not possible to use RadProgressManager in WebFarm. If you need to monitor the progress of file uploads you can use RadAsyncUpload instead.

Q:  Is LightWeight rendering supported for old browsers that does not support html5?

A:  It’s best to be used in modern browsers. In old browsers the controls will be fully functional, but will look differently, just without the CSS3 goodies like gradients, rounded corners and so on

Q:  Can the DropDownTree load on demand?

A:  In its first version the control does not support load on demand. The good news is that we are going to introduce WebService binding for an upcoming release.  Watch for our roadmap announcement.

Q:  Can you mark checkboxes by clicking the word instead of the checkbox itself?  This is a limitation in ComboBox

A:  That feature is in our TODO list. Regarding to the RadComboBox its checkbox functionality is updated and it works as you expected.  Review the RadComboBox checkbox demo to see more.

Q:  Why have the classic mode at all?

A:  This is part of our backwards compatibility and old browser support.

Q:  How much is this different from using RadComboBox with RadTreeView inside?

A:  This is much easier to set up, has simpler rendering and skinning.  It also performs much better

Q:  We looked at this dropdownlist control but decided not to use at this time because it does not have a css controlled label parameter - RadComboBox has this parameter. Suggest you add the label parameter in the next release.

A:  The purpose of the Label property of the RadComboBox is to make it compliant, since each input should have an associated label, but since the DropDownlList does not have input elements in its rendering thus no need of a build-in label has emerged.  We could add such label but it won’t be different than a standard label control since there is nothing to associate this label with.

Q:  Barcoding generating images

A:  In this release we generate an IMG tag with a data-source set to the base64 encoded source of the barcode.  You may be able to reverse-engineer something from the rendered control.

Summary

Thank you everyone for watching and participating in this webinar.  Stay in touch with us, use our support forums, talk to us on Twitter, and share some of the cool things you are doing with our controls.


About the Author

Jeffrey T. Fritz

Jeffrey T. Fritz is a Microsoft MVP in ASP.Net and an ASPInsider with more than a decade of experience writing and delivering large scale multi-tenant web applications. After building applications with ASP, ASP.NET and now ASP.NET MVC, he is crazy about building web sites for all sizes on any device. You can read more from Jeffrey on his personal blog or on Twitter at @csharpfritz. Google Profile


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