Calendar (date-picker) control for mobile devices in ASP.Net

Question

Hi,

I'm looking for a calendar control (aka date-picker) that works on mobile devices. The problem is most devices are w/o JavaScript, or with poor JavaScript support.

ASP.Net's built-in control uses JavaScript to do post-back. ASP.Net has a mobile calendar control, but it isn't fully localizable (on low end devices where it displays a step-by-step date picker its buttons are always in English).

I am thinking of overriding the built-in calendar control to replace the JavaScript post-back directly with parametrized links.

My compound question is - Do you know of a good JavaScript-less calendar control, of a way to get rid of JavaScript in ASP.Net built-in control, or of a way to localize ASP.Net's mobile calendar control?

If you know all of the above doesn't exist - do you think replacing the post-back with parametrized links is a good way to go? Do you have another suggestion?

Thanks,
Asaf

EDIT: Currently, I'm not concerned with formatting - the device I'm targeting displays the date-picker well. I'm concerned only with the small problem of getting it to work...

Answer 1

You can generate some dropdown (<select>) boxes and use as a simple datepicker. You'll need to do some server side validation though, since no javascript would mean that the user could pick an invalid date (31. of Feb for example).

Answer 2

What I ended up doing is building a custom calendar control.

For now, I used a table, but it will have to change when I want to support more devices. Since I'm targeting right-to-left languages, a table is already a pain.

@troelskn - I didn't go for <select> because they're not comfortable for a user using a mobile device, but thank you for the advice.

Answer 3

Keep a watch on http://51degrees.mobi, they are going to release a toolkit of mobile web control very soon this year. It has control like (Calendar, Google Maps, Location etc)

Also if you interested for mobile detection and redirection please try http://51degrees.codeplex.com. It is an ASP.NET open source module which detects mobile devices and provides auto redirection to mobile optimized pages when request is coming from mobile device. It makes use of WURFL mobile device database. For redirection there is no need to modify existing ASP.NET web application pages.