Home/Web Forms/Tutorials/Chapter 5. Ajax Control Toolkit/Animation/Executing Several Animations after Each Other

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 one after the other.

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 <Sequence> element. All animations within <Sequence> are executed one after the other. Here is the a possible markup for the AnimationExtender control, first making the panel wider and then decreasing its height:

<ajaxToolkit:AnimationExtender ID="ae" runat="server" TargetControlID="Panel1"> <Animations> <OnLoad> <Sequence> <Resize Width="1000" Unit="px" /> <Resize Height="150" Unit="px" /> </Sequence> </OnLoad> </Animations> </ajaxToolkit:AnimationExtender>

When you run this script, the panel first gets wider and then smaller.

First the width is increased (Click to view full-size image)

Then the height is decreased (Click to view full-size image)

By Christian Wenz, Christian Wenz is an author, trainer, and consultant. His main focus of working and writing is on web technologies and security. Christian has written or co-written over 100 books for various publishers. He works with both open source and closed source web technologies. This leads to the unusual situation that he has both been awarded a Microsoft MVP for ASP/ASP.NET and is listed in Zend's Who is Who of PHP. He is also listed in Mozilla's credits (about:credits) and is considered an expert in browser-agnostic JavaScript.

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