Executing Several Animations at The Same Time

Christian Wenz

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. It allows to run several animations in a parallel fashion.

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>

Then, add the AnimationExtender to the page, providing an ID, the TargetControlID attribute and the obligatory runat="server":

<ajaxToolkit:AnimationExtender ID="ae" runat="server" TargetControlID="Panel1">

Within the <Animations> node, use <OnLoad> to run the animations once the page has been fully loaded. Generally, <OnLoad> only accepts one animation. The Animation framework allows you to join several animations into one using the <Parallel> element. All animations within <Parallel> are executed at the same time.

Here is the a possible markup for the AnimationExtender control, fading out and resizing the panel at the same time:

<ajaxToolkit:AnimationExtender ID="ae" runat="server" TargetControlID="Panel1">      <Animations>           <OnLoad>                <Parallel>                     <FadeOut Duration="1.5" Fps="24" />                     <Resize Width="1000" Height="150" Unit="px" />                </Parallel>           </OnLoad>      </Animations> </ajaxToolkit:AnimationExtender>

And indeed: when you run this script, the panel is displayed, then resizes (more than threefolding its width and halfing its height) and fades out at the same time.

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