So Dev

Journey to find a free date picker solution for ASP.Net 1.1

Our ASP.Net intranet applicaiton project needs a data picker for all the date field. At first I thought this was just a simple task, since:

- There are some freeware (or even open source) day picker on the market.
- The function I looked for seems to be simple and straight forward. I just need a way to pick a date. No additional require on how the calendar should be presented.

However, the seraching was more trouble than I expected. I tried more than several day pickers and they failed me one way or the other:

- IGERSoft Datepicker [Link]
* Failed to work properly in FireFox.
* Something wrong when using the control with PostBack. DOUBLE control was created! ACtually the problem is kind of well known And the solution can be as simply as disabling SmartNavigation ("this.SmartNavigation = true" in formload of our custom Page class), but doing so I have to give up SmartNavigation (which brings to user back to the previous edited point.
* Not open source
* Editbox cannot be modified.
* Changing text style in property page doesnt' seem to have any effect on the rendered calendar.

- Cool Calendar
Pros:
* Open Source
Cons:
* Have serious problem with year and month navigation. When there's 2 controls on the screen, clicking the year navigation on one control may trigger the month control on of the ANOTHRE control!


DateTimePicker Web Control [Link]
Pros
* Open Source
Cons
* Just like IGERSoft Datepicker, SmartNavigation needs tp be turned off in order to work properly.
* Does not work consistantly/
* Serious problem embedding on my project pages. I got "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" on "string[] con=style.Split(delim.ToCharArray());".

ObjectGraph OGDatePicker [Link]
* When I tried to bring up the calendar by clicking on the calendar button, the calendar showed up at some very obscurre place, like at the very low right hand corner.
* AFter I tried closed the calendar, instead of making the calendar disappear, it shows up at some other obsure place.


Pop-up Calendar 1.2 [Link]
* It uses layer, meaning that it will have problem with out table centric page design.
* It creates timeout problem when loading the control.
* The style of the pop-up calendar was totally messed up after POST BACK.

So, what is my solution? Well, I decided to use IGERSoft Datepicker, change the EvisPage so that SmartNavigation is not turned on by default, and finally use this control [code] to do the smart navigation thing.

Additional information about why SmartNavigation is a bad idea:
- http://blog.joycode.com/microhelper/articles/1317.aspx
- http://weblogs.asp.net/ksamaschke/archive/2003/04/27/6085.aspx
- http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/lili2.asp
- http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/lili.asp
- http://blogs.msdn.com/conrad/archive/2004/09/02/225091.aspx
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posted by Deecay @ 10:08 AM