All systems need a way to share status messages with a user, without giving them feedback they don’t what has or what will happen. There are so many different ways to send an alert (modal window, JavaScript alert, inline HTML, etc…), regardless of what you use it always help to be consistent. I built this control based on a few different ideas/examples a long time ago, and I seem to find more uses for it all the time. You can call it from the server or from the client using JavaScript, making it the perfect single solution “notification” solution.

Here is an example of what it looks like.

ASP.NET MessageBox User Control Screenshot

** The text after the heading, is the code that was used to trigger the message box.

The control is pretty straight forward, on the server it works by “re-injecting” the rendered control when you call Show function. Since the control does not use viewstate, every time you post back to the server and call show again, the last message disappears and the new message is displayed. If you want the message to disappear “automatically” after a few seconds, you can can set the timeout in milliseconds. On the client (via JavaScript), you can create a simple function that will provide access to throwing alerts from the client without a postback.

Client Side Example

<script type="text/javascript">
	function ShowSuccess(message) {
		$alert = $('#MBWrapper1');

		$alert.removeClass().addClass('MessageBoxInterface');
		$alert.children('p').remove();
		$alert.append('<p>' + message + '</p>').addClass('successMsg').show().delay(8000).slideUp(300);
	}
</script>

Server Side Example

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
	protected void Success_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
	{
		MessageBox1.ShowSuccess("Success, page processed.", 5000);
	}
}

ASP.NET MessageBox User Control – Full Working Demo

Download and try the demo, if you like what you see… Here is what you need to include to make the control work in your project.

  • MessageBox User Control (ASMX & CS)
  • jQuery
  • IMessageBox.css stylesheet
  • All the graphics from the Images folder

** Note: If you move the images into a different directory, you’ll need to update the CSS to use the correct path to the images.