Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

The Calendar Extender is pretty neat in how it works, as part of the AJAX Control Toolkit.  By clicking on a control or button, it renders a calendar, which has a link to today's date at the bottom, the calendar (and other month days) in the center, and a header on the top.  The header allows you to click it, transforming to a year view, which you can select a specific month, or you can even navigate down to a decade view, which allows you to select a specific year (you can see a demonstration here).

It's really neat in how it works, and is very functional, but there are a few issues I find with it.  For instance, when using an image as the button, most people don't realize that you have to click the button again to make it go away.  Most people are used to a little x in the upper right corner, or being able to click away somewhere else and that disables it.  In addition, I haven't found a way to disable dates passed the current day with it, or do other date processing tricks.

Still, it's overtly useful; however, it's limitations must be understood.  If you can do any of these things and I am in error, please provide a comment.

Published Tuesday, February 06, 2007 10:11 AM by bmains
Filed under: ,

Comments

# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

Monday, September 24, 2007 2:48 AM by Nishant

When placed inside an Update Panel, the Calendar Extender shows only 6 days of the week instead of 7 days.

# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

Wednesday, October 03, 2007 6:59 AM by auiea

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# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

Saturday, October 06, 2007 11:02 AM by mike

It goes away in the demo here when you select the date

I can't get ti to work like this though :(

www.asp.net/.../Calendar.aspx

# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

Tuesday, October 09, 2007 7:19 AM by Neil

I've noticed a big impact on performance when using them and have currently decided against using them in some places.

For instance - without the Calendar Extender a page to 1 second to perform an update. With 4 Calendar Extenders on the page the update took 7 seconds

# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

Tuesday, November 06, 2007 3:23 PM by kweeket

One way to get the CalendarExtender to disappear when you select a date is to set the CalendarExtender's property called OnClientDateSelectionChanged, which can call a JavaScript function that hides the calendar.

For example:

<script type="text/javascript" language="Javascript">

 function hideCalendar(oCalendar)

 {

   oCalendar.hide();

   oCalendar.get_element().blur();

 }

</script>

<ajaxToolkit:CalendarExtender ID="Calendar1" TargetControlID="dateTextBox" runat="Server" OnClientDateSelectionChanged="hideCalendar" />  

# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 5:09 AM by Pettrer

Hi,

Unfortunately you are not wrong abbout disabling dates in the past or future, which makes this extender useless for say an online booking system.

However, here's a link to how to get under the hood and tweak those things: codegoeshere.blogspot.com/.../extending-calendarextender.html.

Personally, until the remarkable shortcomings of the extendercontrol are overcome, I will go back to the old control.

# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

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# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

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# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

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# re: Calendar Extender Pros/Cons

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