>VS.NET 2003
>
>When you make changes to a form - add controls, revise its layout etc. several problems come up:
>
>1. The generated HTML gets nasty-looking - control tags run on one after another without line breaks etc. Are there any global settings that control that kind of thing?
No but it sounds you're using grid layout. I would advise not to use that as it's using absolute positioning with DHTML that won't work in downlevel browsers and as you've found out VS.NET can really screw up the layout for you.
>
>2. The tab order depends (by default) on the control order in the HTML. Is there any way to get VS to do the grunt work of moving controls around in the HTML so the tab order is what I want?
Tab order is not a concept supported by HTML. Controls are rendered top down - since there's no 'absolute' positioning in flow layout there's also no concept of tab order.
>3. Is there any way to set the "focus" on a form to a given control, rather than the browser's address bar?
It takes only a little bit of JavaScript to do this:
<body onload="document.getElementById('txtCompany').focus()">I have a property on my base Web Form class called FocusedControl I can set. This is handled in the base class like this:
protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
{
if (this.FocusedControl != null)
this.RegisterStartupScript("FocusedControl",
"<script language='javascript'>\r\ndocument.getElementById('" +
this.FocusedControl.ID + "').focus();\r\n</script>\r\n");
base.OnPreRender (e);
} This generically injects the script code into the page and it's as easy as picking the FocusedControl from the designer at design time.
