Reference ASP.NET control by ID in JavaScript?

Question

When ASP.NET controls are rendered their ids sometimes change, like if they are in a naming container. Button1 may actually have an id of ctl00_ContentMai

Answer 1

Couple of thoughts on this:

1) I've had a lot of luck getting elements by css class instead of id because asp.net ids are not reliable as you stated. I use this function and it performs reasonably well:

function getElementsByClass(searchClass,node,tag) {
 var classElements = new Array();
 if ( node == null )
    {
        node = document;
    }

 if ( tag == null )
    {
        tag = '*';
    }

 var els = node.getElementsByTagName(tag);
 var elsLen = els.length;
 var pattern = new RegExp("(^|\\s)"+searchClass+"(\\s|$)");

 for (i = 0, j = 0; i < elsLen; i++) 
    {
        if ( pattern.test(els[i].className) ) 
            {
                classElements[j] = els[i];
                j++;
            }
      }
 return classElements;
}

2) jQuery helps here alot. Using jQuery you can reliably get elements where the id ends with a certain string. While this is not "the" reason to use jQuery it's definitely a plus.

3) This will be fixed in asp.net 4.0 so hang in there :-) http://weblogs.asp.net/asptest/archive/2009/01/06/asp-net-4-0-clientid-overview.aspx