Question

I’m using the AutoComplete control from the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and I’m experiencing an issue where the AutoComplete does not populate when I set the focus to the assigned textbox.

I’ve tried setting the focus in the Page_Load, Page_PreRender, and Page_Init events and the focus is set properly but the AutoComplete does not work. If I don’t set the focus, everything works fine but I’d like to set it so the users don’t have that extra click.

Is there a special place I need to set the focus or something else I need to do to make this work? Thanks.

Answer 1

We had exactly the same problem. What we had to do is write a script at the bottom of the page that quickly blurs then refocuses to the textbox. You can have a look at the (terribly hacky) solution here: http://www.drive.com.au

The textbox id is MainSearchBox_SearchTextBox. Have a look at about line 586 & you can see where I’m wiring up all the events (I’m actually using prototype for this bit.

Basically on the focus event of the textbox I set a global var called textBoxHasFocus to true and on the blur event I set it to false. The on the load event of the page I call this script:

if (textBoxHasFocus) {     $get('MainSearchBox_SearchTextBox').blur();     $get('MainSearchBox_SearchTextBox').focus(); }   

This resets the textbox. It’s really dodgy, but it’s the only solution I could find