| As you may have noticed, all the validation messages take up a lot of space on the page you may not want to sacrifice all that space for your validation messages. ASP.NET provides its ValidationSummary control so that you can display all the validation messages in one place as well as display either nothing at all or a simple indicator next to each invalid control. The sample page, shown in Figure 8.3, displays an asterisk next to each invalid control and full error message text in the summary. Figure 8.3. The ValidationSummary control lists all the ErrorMessage properties for invalid controls in one place.
Adding the ValidationSummary control is simple: All you have to do is place the control on your page. It automatically seeks out all the various validation controls on the page, gathering the ErrorMessage property from each control as necessary. To set the text to be displayed within the validation controls themselves, set the Text property for each control. This property overrides the ErrorMessage property, and each control uses the Text property to determine what to show within its own display. (If you don't specify the Text property, as has been the case throughout this chapter, the controls display their ErrorMessage property.) To add the ValidationSummary control to your page, follow these steps: -
Select the first validation control on the page and then Shift+click each of the remaining validation controls, selecting them all. -
In the Properties window, set the Text property (for all the selected controls) to *. -
Click directly above the Save button to place the insertion point within the page. In the Toolbox window, double-click the ValidationSummary control to insert an instance of this control. -
Browse the page and then click Save without entering any data. Try entering invalid data in some of the controls. When you submit the page, you should see asterisks next to the invalid controls and a summary of the errors at the bottom of the page. TIP If you want to modify the layout and behavior of the ValidationSummary control, check out the DisplayMode property, which can be set to List, BulletList, or Paragraph. Try them all to see how they affect the display. In addition, you might check out the ShowMessageBox property, which allows you to have up-level browsers (such as Internet Explorer) display a message box alert containing the validation information.
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