UpdateProgress with UpdatePanel not showing up in User control when page is loading

Question

Is this typical behavior of the UpdateProgress for an ASP.Net UpdatePanel? I have an update panel with the UpdateProgress control inside of a user control window on a page.

If I then make the page in the background do some loading and click a button in the user control update panel the UpdateProgress does not show up at all. It's like the UpdatePanels refresh request is not even registered until after the actual page is done doing it's business. It's worth noting that it will show up if nothing is happening in the background.

The functionality I want is what you would expect. I want to loader to show up if it has to wait for anything to get it's refresh done when after the button is clicked.

I know I can get this functionality if I just use jquery ajax with a static web method, but you can't have static web methods inside of a user control. I could have it in the page but it really doesn't belong there. A full-blown wcf wouldn't really be worth it in this case either. I'm trying to compromise with an UpdatePanel but these things always seem to cause me some kind of trouble.

Maybe this is just the way it works?

Edit:So I'll clarify a bit what I'm doing.

What's happening is I have a page and all it has on it are some tools on the side and a big map. When the page initially loads it takes some time to load the map. Now if while it's loading I open up the tool (a user control) that has the update panel in question in it and click the button on this user control that should refresh the update panel with new data and show the loading sign (in the updateprogress) then the UpdateProgress loading image does not show up. However, the code run by the button click does run after the page is done loading (as expected) and The UpdateProgress will show up if nothing on the page containing the user control is loading.

I just want the loader to show up while the page is loading.

I thought my problem was that perhaps the map loading is in an update panel and my UpdateProgress was only being associated with the update panel for the user control's update panel. Hence, I would get no loading icon when the map was loading. This is not the case though.

Answer 1

I'm not completely following exactly what you're doing here, but I'm assuming you've taken what's in your user control and verified that it works correctly if placed directly in the page?

As a side note, I'm personally ripping out UpdatePanels and replacing with jQuery replacements due to the significant performance savings in addition to the fact that it's way more time-effective to figuring out jQuery et al. quirks instead of ASP.NET AJAX quirks. To be honest, I wish I could claw back the time I did invest in UpdatePanels/ASP.NET AJAX.