I started working on a few new controls that eventually might find
their way into a control suite of some kind. First, I built a
AutoCompleteTextBox much like the To Email field in Gmail.
When you type in the textbox, a search takes place and you get a
dropdownlist of data. In the pic below, I bound "FirstName, LastName,
Email" and then set FormatString = "{0} {1} <{2}>". This way
all three fields are searchable. I also set ValueSeparator="," so that
it could handle multiple values.
Right now it sends all the data to the client, but I'm adding in a
XMLHttp system that pulls the data dynamically, like google's new autocomplete search feature. That should make for a pretty powerful control. Here's a preview:
The second control uses a lot of the above code, but does it with a
dropdownlist/combobox/autocomplete interface that's pretty popular. I'd
like to combine this with the ability to have tabular data in the
dropdownlist. This may have to be two different controls, but it'd be
nice to have one really powerful dropdownlist control.