Asp.Net ListBox and JQuery

Question

We have a page that contains a ListBox that is disabled (in the codebehind). This ListBox can be enabeled by checking a checkbox on the page; it gets re-enabled with javascript using JQuery.

So, the problem is when the control is first disabled then re-enabled on the page, it does not have a selected item even if one is selected.

The same code works fine if the ListBox was never disabled in the codebehind.

Is there any way to re-enable the ListBox, using JQuery, so the selected values will be posted to the server?

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this is a .net 2.0 project using VS 2005 and no .NET MVC

Answer 1

You will need to come up with a solution where the ListBox is always server-side enabled and visible. So a jQuery-only solution to disabling a select. I would add a hidden field, have it store a switch for whether or not the select should be enabled. This will allow your jQuery code to report to the server whether or not the control was enabled at the time of postback.

You would obviously have to write jQuery code to tie the hidden field and select together and manage the disabled/enabled state.

Edit: Now that I think about it. You could get the value of the select from the Request.Form collection and assigning the value to your ListBox during Page_Init. You would lose any ListBox.*Changed events.

Answer 2

A work around for this might be to get the value on postback via Request.Form[listbox.ClientID]. Its not as "nice" as using the ViewState but it should work.