Hello,
This question may or may not be ridiculous, I am brand new to ASP.NET (my time has largely been spent developing algorithmically complex console applications). This question may ultimatey not even belong here either, but my understanding is that partial postbacks are AJAX.
At any rate, what I'm trying to do seems like it should be simple enough, yet I appear to be missing something key.
The goal I have is to, when a user supplies a name in a textbox field and then clicks the submit button, have a method in the code-behind run and update the web page as it processes. What I have found, however, is that it will not update the webpage until processing completes. Even when I call the updatePanel.Update() method during the processing, it will not update anything until the entire method is complete, and then returns all the results.
What I want to update is exceedingly simple. It is a two column, three row asp:table. In column 1 sits an image, and column 2 the corresponding text. When the processing starts row 1 should become visible, showing the "processing" image and corresponding text. When the processing for that row completes it should then either show the corresponding passed or failed image and text. If it fails, I exit out of the method. If it succeeds, row 2 should then become visible with the corresponding "processing" image and text. When the processing for that row completes it should then either show the corresponding passed or failed image and text. If it fails, I exit out of the method. And so on and so forth. Technically speaking this is only for 3 rows, but in reality even if it was 300 rows the behavior should not change.
What am I missing to make the synchronous page updates work? Right now if I click the button, I see nothing until the entire method in the code behind completes, and then suddenly the results for all 3 rows are visible... I want to update as it progresses, not at the end.