Just before leaving work Friday afternoon, the boss tried out my code. He liked it generally speaking, but he didn't like that the Research button, when clicked with nothing in the Search textbox on the SearchResults page, puts up a message box before reloading the page. He said that it looked like it was going to a separate page to display the error message then returning to the SearchResults page.

He wants it so that the page initially loads loads, you don't enter anything into the textbox, click Research, and have a Javascript alert message box displayed. But, if the user put something in the textbox, go to the VB.Net code behind, retrieve data from the SQL table and reload the page with the new data populating the grid.

Can this be done? If so, how?

[script type="text/JavaScript"]
function CheckSearchInput()
[
	var txtBox = document.getElementById("txtResearch").value;
	if (txtBox.value == "") [
		alert("Please Enter A Value");
		return false;
	]
	return true;
]
[/script]

[ ... ]

[asp:Button runat="server" ID="btnResearch" Text="Search" CssClass="ResearchButton" OnClick="CheckSearchInput()" /]

==> gives a build error: "CheckSearchInput is not a member of 'ASP.SearchResults.aspx'. It does the same thing if I move the function into a separate Javascript file. It also gave me the build error when I made the button a standard HTML button.

Changed the Javascript function to this:

function CheckSearchInput() [
	if (document.getElementById("txtResearch").value == "") [
		alert("Please Enter A Name, A Member ID #, or A Social Security Number!");
            ]
	else [
                SearchResults.submit();
            ]
        ]

and changed the button from an "asp:button" to an HTML button. Now I'm getting the desired actions.