Not Ready for Prime Time

[SSirica]

This control is not ready for practical use.  It has almost no usable server methods.  It doesn't even have a server SelectedIndexChanged event?  How am I supposed to get SQL data based on when the user makes a change?  It has no ItemDataBound...how am I supposed to add attributes for data I don't want to show?

This is like building a car and putting on a nice fresh coat of paint, but not including the engine or the tires.  I was excited to finally use a true multicolumn combo box in our produtcts, but I can't use this control in it's current state.  I am super dissapointed.

[Peter Milchev]

Hello SSirica,

Thank you for taking the time to share your valuable opinion and feedback regarding the control. Such community points of view are helpful for us to determine the exact behavior and implementation of the control so that it helps to solve a vast amount of scenarios.

Regarding the technical aspect of this thread, yes, there are some necessary improvements, such as the Server-side events, which we will try to include in one of the Latest Internal Builds to allow users to test it, and make it official with the next official release of the suite. Here is the feature request for the server-side events in our Feedback portal item: No Server Side events for new MultiColumnComboBox control.

Please share any comments in it, what events you find useful and some sample business cases for the events. You can also open other feature requests in the Feedback portal about any feature you find useful for the control: MultiColumnComboBox features.

Also, keep in mind that the MultiColumnComboBox is a wrapper of the Kendo UI MultiColumnComboBox widget, which is entirely client-side. Still, we are trying to improve the control wrapper to have as close as possible server-side control feel and behavior, keeping the benefits of the underlying Kendo UI widget.

As a temporary workaround, you can get the data programmatically in a DataTable, modify it as desired to contain the necessary info and assign it as a DataSource for the control. Then, all the needed information will be serialized and will be available on the client-side. Here is a Code Library we created that addresses this scenario: Add custom data to dataitem similar to adding attributes in ItemDataBound event and here is a KB article to imitate the SelectedIndexChanged event: Achieve SelectedIndexChanged server-side event behavior with RadMultiColumnComboBox.

If you have any further improvement suggestions, please share them with us, we will be glad to hear them and we praise such activity. With that said, we have updated your Telerik points as a token of gratitude for helping us to improve our controls.

Regards,
Peter Milchev
Progress Telerik

[SSirica]

Thanks, but that's a lot of work just to simulate a SelectIndexChange.  There's an old saying "The more parts that move...the more things there are to go wrong." 

I think I'll stick with the old Combobox control till this thing gets an engine and some tires.