Tracking Link Clicks

Hi,

I posted this before in the "Web Forms" section, but I was just thinking what I might need is an AJAXian solution.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to track user clicks on links. I could easily do this by making all the links LinkButton's and just use the PostBackUrl property or response.redirect or something like that to send the user on to the page they clicked to.

However, this is not a very good solution because spiders would be unable to crawl these links and I need to have the option of opening the pages from the links in a new browser window at times.

So basically if the HyperLink control had an "OnClick" property that fired before doing the default thing (ie following the link), that would be ideal, but it does not.

So I was just wondering if anyone had any good ideas on how to create a "link" control that would allow search engines to crawl the links, allow me to at times open the linked page into a new browser window (ie target=_blank), and also to record the user clicks into a database?

Would there be a way to use the javascript onclick event to fire some function that calls a service or something on the server to update my database with the click information? If so how would I do that?

Hi,

I just replied in your other thread. Though now I've seen you mention AJAX this would allow you to accomplish a lot more.

Cheers,

Al

Tree, Menu, etc not usable in UpdatePanel. Any workarounds?

I spent a long (probably too long before checking the forums) time tracking down the "0.cells is null or not an object" problem. To come to find out that the tree, the menu, and the grid don't work with the UpdatePanel (See notes near bottom ofhere).

I'm wondering if there are any workarounds that anyone has come up with. This kinda sucks since part of my design was to use a goodly amount of popups that allow modifications and those are nicely handled using menus, trees, and such. I know that microsoft says they're working on some ajax based controls that wrap these other controls up. But the need is kinda here and now (Maybe I just don't have a latest update of ACT or something?) Anyway using Telerik or some other commercial control is just not feasible in my budget at the moment. So I thought I'd see if anyone had any workarounds.

For that matter does anyone have any workarounds for accordions to make them horizontal (to make them open and close left to right instead of up and down)?

I'm thinking that some other people have experienced some problems such as these and might be working on some ideas as far as workarounds.If so then perhaps we could "band together" and create an area on CodePlex (and possibly some referers at google, sourceforge and the like) to at least give some pointers to some other efforts to expand on the ACT.

Anyway just wanted to throw that alternate idea out there, but if anyone has any viable workarounds for the lack of support of trees, grids, and menus in the UpdatePanel, I and probably many others would be glad to hear about it.

Thanks in advance,
Christopher

The UpdatePanel included in the .Net framework 3.5 supports having treeview and menu controls in them. There is a go live license for VS 2008. Maybe you can use VS 2008

http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/09/08/asp-net-enhancements-in-vs2008-and-net-fx3-5.aspx

I am not sure that the TreeView is supported in .NET 3.5. My suggestion is to use any third pary javascript library for the treeview and use WebService for the data transfer.

yeah moving up to VS2k8 and moving up to .NET 3.X (3.5 in beta) doesn't seem like an option (at this point) to have this "design paradigm" adopted. It means to many other adoption points. Hmm I'll keep you all updated I guess as far as any solutions, but if anyone else has something to contribute I'm quite willing to work with them. In my mind this begs further investigation. ;-)

Controls that Are Not Compatible with UpdatePanel Controls

The following ASP.NET controls are not compatible with partial-page updates, and are therefore not supported inside anUpdatePanel control:

TreeView andMenu controls.

Web Parts controls. For more information, seeASP.NET Web Parts Controls.

FileUpload controls when they are used to upload files as part of an asynchronous postback.

GridView andDetailsView controls when their EnableSortingAndPagingCallbacks property is set totrue. The default isfalse.

Login,PasswordRecovery,ChangePassword, andCreateUserWizard controls whose contents have not been converted to editable templates.

TheSubstitution control.

Validation controls, which includes theBaseCompareValidator,BaseValidator,CompareValidator,CustomValidator,RangeValidator,RegularExpressionValidator,RequiredFieldValidator, andValidationSummary control.

Yes that's what I was saying in my original post when I said that they don't work with an update panel and referred to the document thru a link. So I guess I'm missing your point in posting that with no statements by you. Is there some workaround that I'm missing in my reading of it?

Thanks in advance,
Christopher