Question

i am beginner for asp.net . I now facing a problem . How can i force a user to select option from ajax control toolkit autocomplete?
Here is my sample code

<cus:cusTextBox ID="txtCMemberID" runat="server" Action="Edit"
    CssClass="inputTextM" OnTextChanged="txtCMemberID_TextChanged"
    AutoPostBack="True"></cus:cusTextBox>
<asp:AutoCompleteExtender ID="AutoCompleteExtender2" runat="server"
    ServicePath="~/Module/Common/autoComplete/acLewreMember.asmx"
    MinimumPrefixLength="1" ServiceMethod="GetSuggestedStrings"
    TargetControlID="txtCMemberID" CompletionInterval="10"
    CompletionSetCount="3" EnableCaching="true"
    CompletionListCssClass="completionListElement"
    CompletionListItemCssClass="listItem"
    CompletionListHighlightedItemCssClass="highlightedListItem"
    FirstRowSelected="True"
    ShowOnlyCurrentWordInCompletionListItem="True">
</asp:AutoCompleteExtender>

As you see the textbox is a custom control. Is that any way to force user to select option from autocomplete?Please provide me a sample code also. thanks

Answer 1

ASP.NET includes a useful feature called a validator.

<asp:TextBox ID="TextBox2" ValidationGroup="Group2" runat="server" />
<asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator2" ErrorMessage="*Required" ValidationGroup="Group2"
ControlToValidate="TextBox2" runat="server" />
<asp:Button ID="Button2" Text="Validate Group2"
ValidationGroup="Group2" runat="server" />

Here is the resource link for msdn: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.webcontrols.requiredfieldvalidator.aspx

I’m not sure how these work with custom controls as I’m relatively new at asp. They also have a custom validator which might be more suited for your purposes, but like I said. I don’t know exactly.

Note: If the client is using an old browser this won’t work, so you also want to check on the server that this field isn’t empty by using:

if (Page.IsValid)
{
     //stuff to do in your event handler
}