Building Interactive User Interfaces with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX: Enabling Bookmarking and the Browser's Back Button

AJAX applications offer a more interactive user experience by replacing traditional full page postbacks with leaner and more efficient partial page postbacks. These partial page postbacks are executed asynchronously using JavaScript code in the browser. When a web surfer clicks on a link or submits a form (via a full page postback) the browser automatically adds the page being left to the browser's history. This allows the web surfer to use his Back and Forward buttons to navigate through this history. However, the partial page postbacks performed by AJAX applications do not cause the browser to register anything in their history. As a consequence, if a user visits an AJAX-enabled web page, performs a number of partial page postbacks, and then clicks the Back button, she is not returned to the state of the page prior to the last partial page postback. Instead, she is taken back to the page she was at before arriving at the AJAX-enabled web page.

The good news is that starting with ASP.NET 3.5 SP 1, the ScriptManager control in the ASP.NET AJAX Framework includes functionality for creating history points in an AJAX-enabled web page. Adding a history point creates an entry in the browser's history for a particular page state. What's more, this page state is encoded in the querystring of the browser, meaning that visitors can bookmark a particular state of an AJAX application.

This article shows how to add history points using the ScriptManager control. In particular, it shows how to record history points whenever the user pages or sorts a GridView. Read on to learn more!

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