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The aggravation
You are traveling to a web page where you will enter data. Your fingers
hover expectantly over the keyboard. A thin line of saliva trickles down your
chin. You dry your face in your sleeve without moving your fingers from the keyboard.
Boom! The page has loaded but ... where is the cursor? Arrrrgh! You've got to
reach over and grab the mouse and click in the textbox. Now you are ready
to start typing. Sound familiar?
Big deal
Is this a big deal? To the person who uses the page occasionally,
it would be nice if the cursor were automatically set to where they need to
start typing. Nice and thoughtful but not that big of a deal. To the person
chained to the desk, using your page all day, it is a very big deal.
The solution
Here is the solution that seems to work best for me. In the code-behind
file for a page (if you use code-behind), create a procedure named SetFocus
as follows:
Private
Sub SetFocus(ByVal
ctrl As System.Web.UI.Control)
Dim
s
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As String
= "<SCRIPT language='javascript'>document.getElementById('"
& ctrl.ID & "').focus() </SCRIPT>"
RegisterStartupScript("focus",
s)
End Sub
The following shows how you'd
call the procedure to set the focus on a textbox named txtSerialNumber when
the form first loads. This also will be in the code-behind file:
If
Page.IsPostBack = False
Then
' Blah Blah Blah All the other stuff you want to do
Me.SetFocus(Me.txtSerialNumber)
End
If
Conclusion
Works for me, man. If you have a more elegant solution, let me know. You
can email me at RogerMcCook@hotmail.com.
Roger D. McCook
McCook Software, Inc.
