Question

I am using asp.net 3.5 (codebehind c#). My users are running IE 7 or 8. I have a data entry page with several TextBoxes.

When I want to clear the all the TextBoxes, I do a sever.transfer back to the same page.

Maybe 99% of the time, this clears the TextBoxes. Every so often it does not.

I know that a roundtrip to the server has happened because:

• The dropdown lists and radiobuttonlists on the page get reset, and
• DB processing happened as shown by a record having been saved to the
  DB.

The inconsistency is confusing me.

What could be causing the TextBoxes to persist data in this way and how can I prevent it from ever happening?

It is resulting in users saving the same data twice.

I don’t think this would have anything to do with it, but there are also various js functions on the page for validation, capitalizing the first letter of an input, etc

Answer 1

As this MSDN article describes the Server.Transfer method, this is probably not the right way to empty the TextBoxes. The method explicitly keeps all state information.

A better approach is described within this answer:

foreach (var item in Page.Controls)
        {
            if (item is TextBox)
            {
                ((TextBox)item).Text = "";
            }
        }

You will keep the roundtrips to just one, and you could keep all other user inputs as they were, if you like.