Question

Let me start off by saying I know how to use CausesValidation and ValidationGroup. I have bizarre situation where I have an Ajax Tab container. Each tab has a gridview and the rows that generate in the gridviews all have a TemplateField containing an ‘Add’ button. The buttons in the gridview and tab containers all use ValidationGroup to prevent any cross contamination and all the ‘Add’ buttons are set to CausesValidation = "false"

I just added the last gridview and the ‘Add’ button triggers all validators on the page. Once more the ‘Add’ button is set as CausesValidation = "false" so there is NO reason for it to behave in this fashion. I even set this value on the front end AND in the code behind.

For attempts I have tried the suggestions in these links: “Solution 1” and “Solution 2”

Has anyone else come across this and found a solution?

Edit Request for code:
I will post only the Tab Panel in question as the whole container is almost 500 lines

<asp:TabPanel ID="tab_Browse" runat="server" HeaderText="Browse">
            <ContentTemplate>
                <table id="browseTable">
                    <tr>
                        <td>Category</td>
                        <td>
                            <asp:DropDownList ID="browseDDL" runat="server" AppendDataBoundItems="True">
                                <asp:ListItem Text="All categories" Value="999"></asp:ListItem>
                            </asp:DropDownList>
                        </td>
                        <td>
                            <asp:Button ID="btnBrowse" runat="server" Text="Browse" ValidationGroup="vgBrowse" OnClick="btnBrowse_Click" />
                        </td>
                    </tr>
                </table>
                <asp:GridView ID="gvBrowse" runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="false" AllowPaging="true" PageSize="8"
                    OnPageIndexChanging="gvBrowse_PageIndexChanging" DataKeyNames="foodId"
                    OnRowDataBound="gvBrowse_RowDataBound" Width="790px">
                    <Columns>
                        <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Food ID" Visible="false">
                            <ItemTemplate>
                                <%# Eval("foodId") %>
                            </ItemTemplate>
                        </asp:TemplateField>
                        <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Description">
                            <ItemTemplate>
                                <%# Eval("Shrt_Desc") %> (100g)
                            </ItemTemplate>
                        </asp:TemplateField>
                        <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Calories" ItemStyle-Width="50px">
                            <ItemTemplate>
                                <%# Eval("cals") %>
                            </ItemTemplate>
                        </asp:TemplateField>
                        <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Fat Grams" ItemStyle-Width="75px">
                            <ItemTemplate>
                                <%# Eval("fat") %>
                            </ItemTemplate>
                        </asp:TemplateField>
                        <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Carbs" ItemStyle-Width="50px">
                            <ItemTemplate>
                                <%# Eval("carbs") %>
                            </ItemTemplate>
                        </asp:TemplateField>
                        <asp:TemplateField ItemStyle-Width="110px">
                            <ItemTemplate>
                                <asp:Button ID="browseAdd" runat="server" CausesValidation="false" Text="Add to meal" CommandArgument="Standard" OnClick="showingEntry" />
                            </ItemTemplate>
                        </asp:TemplateField>
                    </Columns>
                    <RowStyle CssClass="gvRowStyle" />
                    <HeaderStyle CssClass="gvHeader" />
                    <AlternatingRowStyle CssClass="altRow" />
                </asp:GridView>
            </ContentTemplate>
        </asp:TabPanel>

Edit 2 Another interesting tidbit. If I put OnClientClick="alert(Page_IsValid)" on my add button it returns true even though the validators in the others tabs are triggered. if i click the button a second time it returns false and my codebehind fails as if the page posted back but skipped the OnDataBound method

Answer 1

I ended up resolving this problem by preloading the gridview with an empty row. Makes no sense as to why this resolved the problem, but it does.