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Asked: 2026-05-10T16:33:06+00:00

Is there a best practice when it comes to setting client side onclick events

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Is there a best practice when it comes to setting client side ‘onclick’ events when using ASP.Net controls? Simply adding the onclick attribute results in a Visual Studio warning that onclick is not a valid attribute of that control. Adding it during the Page_Load event through codebehind works, but is less clear than I’d like.

Are these the only two choices? Is there a right way to do this that I’m missing?

Thanks! Eric Sipple

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  1. **just a pre-note on the answer: HTML validation in VS is often BS. It complains about stuff that works IRL, even if that stuff is bad practice. But sometimes you gotta bend the rules to get stuff done.

    Every ASP.NET page (2.0 and greater) comes with a ClientScriptManager. You use this to register javascript from server side code. You can pass in javascript that registers events on controls after the page has loaded, when the HTML controls on the page are all present in the DOM.

    It presents a single, unified place on pages to dynamically add javascript, which isn’t a bad thing. It is, however, awfully ugly.

    In this time of the death of the ASP.NET server control model, you might want to set events the way they will be in the future of ASP.NET MVC. Grab a copy of jQuery and add it to your website. You can then easily register your events thusly:

      <html>   <head>     <script type='text/javascript' src='jquery.js'></script>     <script type='text/javascript'>       $(document).ready(function(){         $('controlId').bind('click', function(e) { /* do your best here! */ });       });     </script>   </head>   <!-- etc -->   </html>
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