Modifying Animations From The Server Side (VB)
The Animation control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is not just a control but a whole framework to add animations to a control. The animations may also be changed on the server-side
Overview
The Animation control in the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is not just a control but a whole framework to add animations to a control. The animations may also be changed on the server-side
Steps
First of all, include the ScriptManager in the page; then, the ASP.NET AJAX library is loaded, making it possible to use the Control Toolkit:
<asp:ScriptManager ID="asm" runat="server" />
The animation will be applied to a panel of text which looks like this:
<asp:Panel ID="panelShadow" runat="server" CssClass="panelClass">
ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more
efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work
across all the most popular browsers.<br />
ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more
efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work
across all the most popular browsers.<br />
ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more
efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work
across all the most popular browsers.<br />
</asp:Panel>
In the associated CSS class for the panel, define a nice background color and also set a fixed width for the panel:
<style type="text/css">
.panelClass {background-color: lime; width: 300px;}
</style>
The rest of the code runs on the server-side and does not use markup; instead, it uses code to create the AnimationExtender control:
<script runat="server">
Sub Page_Load()
Dim ae As New AjaxControlToolkit.AnimationExtender()
ae.TargetControlID = "Panel1"
However, the Control Toolkit currently does not provide an API access to create the individual animations. It is however possible to set the AnimationExtender's Animations property to a string containing the XML markup used when assigning the animations declaratively. In order to create the XML which must not contain the <Animations> element you could use the .NET Framework's XML support or, as in the following code, just provide the string:
ae.Animations = "<OnLoad><Parallel><FadeOut Duration=""1.5""
Fps=""24"" /><Resize Width=""1000""
Height=""150"" Unit=""px"" /></Parallel></OnLoad>"
Finally, add the AnimationExtender control to the current page, within the <form runat="server"> element, making sure that the animation is included and runs:
form1.Controls.Add(ae)
End Sub
</script>
The animation is created using server-side C#/VB code (Click to view full-size image)
