Animating in Response To User Interaction

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. The animations can start automatically or may be triggered by user interaction, e.g. by clicking with the mouse.

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, there are five ways to start the animation via user interaction (the missing element is <OnLoad> which is executed once the whole page has been fully loaded):

• <OnClick> (mouse click on the control)
• <OnHoverOut> (mouse leaves the control)
• <OnHoverOver> (mouse hovers over a control, stopping the <OnHoverOut> animation)
• <OnMouseOut> (mouse leaves a control)
• <OnMouseOver> (mouse hovers over a control, not stopping the <OnMouseOut> animation)

In this scenario, <OnClick> is used. When the user clicks on the panel, it is resized and fades out at the same time.

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

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