Question

I’ve got a small login control on my master page. On the login control, I’m using a LinkButton for the Submit button because I like the way it looks.

However, I’m also using jQuery to capture when the ‘enter’ key is pressed in any of the login control text boxes. It’s difficult to trigger the click event of a link button with jQuery in every browser. I’ve even tried hard-coding __doPostBack, but the LinkButton ID is just a tiny bit different from what’s in the built-in href=”__doPostBack” attribute on the control. It’s not responding to .trigger(), click(), etc.

On the other hand, a regular Button control works just fine with jQuery click(). But I’m not a big fan of the way buttons look, and my CSS skills are limited. Is there an easy way to style a normal ASP.NET button control to look like a link? Or is there an easy way to make the LinkButton behave with jQuery? I’ll choose whichever method requires less effort. 🙂

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can get the exact JavaScript that the LinkButton fires by using the ClientScriptManager:

string postbackFunction = this.Page.ScriptManager.GetPostBackEventReference(myLinkButton, "");

string jQueryBlock = @"$('#loginbox').keypress(function(e){
    if(e.which == 13) {" + postbackFunction + ";}});

//print the jQueryBlock to the page

It will output a JS function call that looks something like this:

__doPostBack('linkButtonID','', 0);