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Wednesday, March 11, 2009

ValidationSummary displayed multiple times in UpdatePanel

While working on a ASP.Net Web Application , we faced a peculiar situation where the validationsummary is displayed many times. Googled around a bit for the solution and this is what I found , I hope this help visitors also.


Asp.net comes is really good with the Validation Controls. For example the RequiredFieldValidator is perfectly suited because it displays a little error message for the control it validates.

All is fine until you have 40-50 fields that have to be filled out. In this case it's of good practice to use the ValidatioSummary control which summarises all the error messages from the ValidationGroup and shows them either in text on the page or as a Javascript alert().

All is fine until you use the ValidationSummary inside an UpdatePanel, where something rather interesting happens. The alert box is displayed multiple times. When I got this behaviour it was even more interesting that the number of times the alert box is displayed was not constant.

But there is a correlation between the number of times the alert is displayed and the number of asynchronous postbacks in that UpdatePanel. The ValidationSummary alert() is displayed exactly the number of asychronous postbacks times plus one.
0 postbacks --> 1 alert
2 postbacks ---> 3 alerts

Solution
To avoid this behaviour you only have to place the ValidationSummary outside the UpdatePanel, this will prevent it from reregistering itself for validation on each asynchronous postback.

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